In one sense, seeing Frank Zappa put out a classical disc
featuring works from an 18th Century Italian composer who shared a
common name shouldn’t be that big of a surprise. After all, this
came at the tail end of a period in Zappa’s career that found him
doing the most experimentation with classical music than any other
time. In another sense, anyone picking up a Zappa album expecting
to hear his raunch-laden rock would be in for a major surprise with
this disc.
Another disc in which Zappa was given the opportunity to
experiment with the Synclavier, this disc proves to be surprisingly
entertaining, if not a little tedious near the end. Like many of
Zappa’s rock-oriented works, the lack of variety in style tends to
be the Achilles’ heel for this disc, though it is hardly a death
blow.
It’s interesting to me, listening to this disc in 2005, how much
I hear an influence it seemed to have on a series like “Baby
Einstein,” in which classical music is synthesized for little ears.
(This disc was compared to Wendy Carlos’s
Switched-On Bach by All-Music Guide – I disagree only in
that this is less bombastic.) This doesn’t mean that the music of
one Francesco Zappa is dumbed down for the listening audience. If
anything, Frank Zappa lovingly presents selections from a composer
who would otherwise have been possibly lost forever to the annals
of time. I can’t say that this music is outstanding in terms of
other composers of the Baroque period, but it does hold up well on
its own.
Two unique pieces are presented on
Francesco Zappa, “Opus I” and “Opus IV,” each one divided
into its unique movements that – not unlike a modern-day composer’s
albums – seemed to naturally segue into one another. While I can’t
say that the Synclavier necessarily does justice to the
instrumentation of the original pieces – such a comparison would
only be possible if these pieces were fully orchestrated – it does
provide a light-hearted peppiness to the music, and that is not
meant as a slight.
Yet as intriguing as this collection is, especially to the
novice classical music fan such as myself,
Francesco Zappa simply runs out of gas near the end. This,
regrettably, has been a problem for any Zappa disc that has
specifically focused on one style of music, such as
Cruising With Ruben & The Jets. I don’t know what could
have been done to improve on this, nor do I even think that
anything should have been added or subtracted to this disc. In
fact, even though my interest started to fade at the end, making
any sort of change to the content would almost be akin to tampering
with history. (To the best of my knowledge, this is the only
recorded example of Zappa the composer’s work.)
Francesco Zappa is a strange yet intriguingly pleasant
addition to Zappa’s vast discography, even if most people didn’t
get the point back in 1984 – or, for that matter, today. I’m
willing to bet that such a disc would fit well into any classical
music fan’s collection, and could even shock some of the
stuffed-shirts in the classical music scene. For all of the
sophomoric humor Zappa was involved in, this is a very mature
effort.
2005 Christopher Thelen and “The Daily Vault.” All rights
reserved. Review or any portion may not be reproduced without
written permission. Cover art is the intellectual property of the
Zappa Family Trust / record label, and is used for informational
purposes only.
