Philip Fried - Saint Paul, MN based Musician

'Reviews Published Friday, November 5, 1999 Minnesota Orchestra weathers the Elements well By Michael Anthony / Star Tribune Just as a painter would have trouble creating a masterpiece in a dark room, a composer can't be expected to write major works for orchestras without getting a chance to hear what those works sound like. The Minnesota Orchestra's Perfect Pitch program, a collaboration with the American Composers Forum, attempts to solve that problem. In nonpublic performances, the orchestra reads through a number of scores, allowing the composers to hear what they've written, and maybe correct some things. Occasionally, a work such as Philip Fried's Elements for Orchestra -- first played in Perfect Pitch -- graduates to the subscription series, as happened Wednesday night at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. Fried, 44, a native of New York City who lives in Minneapolis and teaches at a St. Paul elementary school, writes big-scale, complicated, mostly non-tonal music -- that which used to be called uncompromising. The complications were great enough, in fact, that only the third of the work's four movements was played Wednesday night. Of the four elements of antiquity -- earth, wind, air and fire -- the third movement discourses on water. The movement is also a portrait of Fried's wife, Janet, the composer tells us in a program note. After an ominous rumble in the low woodwinds punctuated by delicate percussion, a brooding theme in the lower strings presents itself and is continued in solo instruments. Tense outbursts in the strings alternate with more subtleties from the percussionists. Fried orchestrates imaginatively. His emotional tone is expressionist anxiety. He packs a great deal of music into just six minutes. Unlike many composers today, he isn't desperate to please, perhaps because he has a lot to say. '