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  Michael
Dowdle created a new masterpiece collection with this 2002 release
of hymn arrangements, called Twenty-Five Beloved Hymns of Christ.
This collection of hymns is preformed on acoustic guitar.
Most
collections these days are largely for piano, thus arrangements
for classical guitar are largely not on most people's radar. You
should definitely put this one on your radar if you have not already,
it's that good.
Most
of us know Michael Dowdle for his work, much of it groundbreaking,
over the years, in LDS and smooth jazz circles. He has been a session
musician for about a quarter century now. He often plays rhythm
guitar on alot of albums, but also does substantial solo work on
instrumental passages in songs as well.
But
this album marks a return to a different facet of his talent, arranging
and playing hymns on the guitar. In 1984 he recorded a hymns album
on the old Embryo Records label titled '50 Favorite Hymns' for the
guitar. That got wide notice, despite it supposedly being literally
thrown together at seemingly the last minute. That album has since
been reissued on CD and is still in print today, one of the few
old Embryo projects still to be available, and it proved to be better
than the story about it being put together might say otherwise.
All
of the hymns but one are in the present hymnbook, the lone one not
in, Beautiful Savior', is found in the Children's Songbook and the
Choirbook. Some of them are sacrament hymns, and Michael treats
these with particular sensitivity.
Sounds
of Zion has put its best foot forward with this project, bringing
a formidable talent and the greatness of the hymns together for
a significant project. Twenty-Five Beloved Hymns of Christ
is the first of three so far in a newer series by Michael Dowdle
that is very well produced and arranged.
Michael
uses theme and variations, although modestly, and modulation as
well as other compositional devices to make hymns we sing week in
and week out at Church meetings and at other times as fresh as they
were the first time we may have heard them. There are very few problems
with this strategy in this project, but that may be just conjecture,
given that even those seemingly problematic passages are actually
making the hymn more interesting than just 'running through' the
tune several times.
The
album is a full 71 minutes long, very generous for an LDS project.
You'll not hear all the verses in some hymns due to their length,
but this was so that he could fit 25 hymns on one disc, but you
really don't miss a thing here so it doesn't matter at all if you
hear only two verses where you sing three.
Many
of the hymns sound like they were recorded by two guitarists, that
was accomplished by multitracking, common to recording some classical
guitar works these days, especially the more difficult ones, often
done to minimize mistakes in recording. I really doubt minimizing
mistakes was the reason, it was more to ensure the best quality
listening experience and to ensure that the album would sound as
fresh to the listener the 20th time as it was the first.
Unlike
classical guitar recordings generally, this was recorded in a studio,
closely miked, but you really don't know the difference unless you
know the difference, but even that is trivial, given the quality
of the recording here. The engineering is
excellent, Guy Randle, another LDS music industry legend, mixed
and mastered the recording, and he left nothing to chance.
This is clearly a five-star recording. Be sure to pick up this one,
as well as the others in this series, that Sounds of Zion have
since released.
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James
Anderson
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