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George Crumb piano music Edward Pearsall Tempo / Volume 58 / Issue 230 / October 2004, pp 78 - 79 DOI: 10.1017/S0040298204240335, Published online: 01 October 2004
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0040298204240335 How to cite this article: Edward Pearsall (2004). George Crumb piano music. Tempo, Tempo, 58, pp 78-79 doi:10.1017/ S0040298204240335 Request Permissions : Click here
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Tempo 58 (230) 76– 90 © 2004 Cambridge University Press
DOI: 10.1017/S0040298204000336 Printed in the United Kingdom
ELLIOTT CARTER : What Next? Valdine Anderson,
Sarah Leonard, Hilary Summers, William Joyner, Dean Elzinga, Emanuel Hoogeveen, Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra c. by Peter Eötvös. ECM New Series 1817
or accept, that they were on the way to their wedding when the accident happened. And following the only moment when they speak as a couple, however briefly – Harry or Larry: Rose fails to understand why you busy
I have to declare two interests before writing about What Next? – namely that I know both the composer and the librettist. In fact I first met Elliott Carter in 2000 at the opera’s US première, through an introduction by its librettist, Paul Griffiths – the beginning of a relationship which led to the composition of Dialogues for piano and chamber orchestra some years later. What Next? is a short opera (40 minutes in this performance), depicting the aftermath of a carcrash – inspired by Jacques Tati’s film Trafic. The characters are clearly defined, although how they interrelate is not, and they spend the opera showing themselves to us in various brief monologues while at the same time trying to discover what exactly has happened, who the others are, and what their relationships are to one another. There is one act, one dramatic flow: the libretto creates solos, duets and ensembles that melt in and out of this flow entirely unrestricted, in a manner virtually identical to Carter’s standard compositional practice, on one level at least. The extraordinary aptness of the libretto to Carter’s music is of course due to Griffiths’s remarkable skill as a writer, but is also nodoubt the result of the unusually close collaboration which they went through over the libretto, described movingly in the excerpts from Griffiths’s diary printed in the booklet. In his note for the piece (also reproduced in the booklet) Carter says that the librettist ‘invented quite sharply defined characters so necessary for a work that has its only real event happen as the curtain rises’. But this is only half the truth, as the opera also ends with a cluster of significant events, producing ‘an ending which is a real ending within the story, but also open, like the ending of Così’, as Griffiths puts it in his diary. A group of mute Road Workers enters some three-quarters of the way through the opera, but the characters’ attempts to make contact with them all fail: a situation which makes the suspicion that all the sung characters are in fact dead seem all the more plausible. What’s more, simultaneous to this new development, two characters apparently begin to realize,
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yourselves with
Rose: My possible husband-to-be asks you to
stop what you’re doing
– Kid asks ‘How was it for only that moment you were able to agree?’. This brief moment of personal connexion is just as significant a gesture as the entrance and simultaneous isolation of the Road Workers, and contributes to a closing dramatic cadence. However imperfect this dramatic cadence might be, however open and unstable the penultimate episode (‘Uproar’) is, and however striving the music of the closing minutes is, this opera does not simply float off into the ether as might appear to be the case on first acquaintance. It is a poignant and powerful ending. The vocal writing throughout is classic Carter: long-breathed, supple and characterful. The orchestral writing is quite remarkably beautiful throughout: unpredictable and complex, while at the same time noble and humane. The performance (recorded live) brings out these qualities, on the whole. Particular mention must be made of Valdine Anderson as Rose, Hilary Summers as Stella, and William Joyner as Zen (the latter two singers created these roles and have sung them in virtually every performance since). The only weakness in the cast recorded here is the small boy-alto part, Kid, but that may partly be down to the strangely muffled and unclear recording quality dished out to him and him alone. (The rest of the recorded balance is rather resonant but serviceable.) The above-mentioned US première performance of What Next? (at Carnegie Hall, with the Chicago SO under Barenboim) was a semi-staged concert performance, as have been all performances since the (fully staged) world première in Berlin. It has frequently been remarked that What Next? works well in this format, perhaps even better than fully staged. The same could be said for the CD format: the opera doesn’t lose as much power as many other operas do from having no visuals aside from those in the mind’s eye.
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Nicolas Hodges
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HENZE: Scorribanda Sinfonica sopra la Tomba di una Maratona; Antifone; Piano Concerto No.11. Christopher
Tainton (pno), Norddeutschen Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester c. Peter Ruzicka. Wergo 6657 2
In the booklet to Wergo’s latest Henze release, Peter Ruzicka translates Scorribanda Sinfonica (2001) as ‘something like ‘symphonic bandit’s raid’ (the German term he uses is ‘sinfonischer Raubzug’). The whole title could be rendered ‘Symphonic Mugging on the Death of a Marathon Dancer’, implying – since the commission for the work arose from an original request to update his 1955–6 ballet Maratona di Danza, which Henze wrote for a production by Luchino Visconti – that Scorribanda is a reworking of the older score for the 21st century. Up to a point there is a certain amount of truth in this, although the original’s interplay of a raucous (intentionally poorly played), onstage jazz band and the slicker, more expressive orchestra is nowhere in evidence. Instead, we have here a symphonic reworking of the older score, but from a new perspective: that of the composer looking back across the decades to the time and place where the ballet was written, as if using the music as a lens with which to examine and illuminate the memory. In idiom, Scorribanda is clearly a product of Henze’s latest style; while the old fingerprints are there, such as scurrying Stravinskyan string figures and Hartmannesque brass and percussion, so are the more integrated harmonic landscapes of his music from the Seventh Symphony on. Scorribanda could perhaps be described as a palimpsest of the earlier ballet, the music in its new guise fulfilling an altogether different expressive purpose. As such it forms part of an important trend in Henze’s music over the past decade and a half, which has seen the revision and reworking of a surprisingly large swathe of his earlier music, from the ballet music based on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot , to the Sixth Symphony and several operas. Antifone (1960), however, seems to have escaped re-treatment: it is presented here in its original form for 11 solo strings, winds and percussion. Written for and dedicated to Herbert von Karajan (who liked the piece so well he waited nearly two years to première it), it is in many ways one of Henze’s most extreme scores. Whereas much of his music in the 1950s had concerned itself with the fusion of Stravinskyan rhythms and Schoenbergian harmonies into a bold, new, German music, Antifone seemed to look exclusively to Webern and post-Webernian serialism for its direction. Here, the dynamics and rhythms as well as pitch are sequentially organ-
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ized, creating a sound world of unusual spareness. Indeed, Henze here sounds probably least like himself than in almost any other work of his that I know. The result is intensely brittle, rather artificial (not least in its division into the four movements of the classical symphony, unconvincing structurally), but sonically fascinating, like the skeleton of a concerto for orchestra. The concerto is possibly the one form Henze has cultivated more assiduously than any other throughout his career. Leaving Antifone aside, he has penned no concertos for orchestra but there are four for piano (if one includes the 1946 Concerto da camera and Tristan of a quarter-century later) plus a lively Stravinskyan Concertino; three for violin, two for cello ( Ode to the West Wind and the delightful Liebeslieder ), plus others for oboe with harp, for clarinet, guitar, viola, double bass and of course the nonet of sacred concertos for piano, trumpet and small orchestra that make up his Requiem. The First Piano Concerto followed only four years after the early Concerto da camera, but by this time Henze had experienced Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto; the impact of that work’s application of dodecaphony is plain. Yet this is not as extremely expressionist or serial an utterance as Antifone. For one thing, the young composer was still inexperienced as a 12-note creator and feeling his way in unfamiliar territory. Secondly, his paying job was as a composer and conductor of ballets, and something of their grace and danceability is audible throughout the score. Indeed, the slow central movement – which comprises over half the duration of the concerto – is entitled Pas de deux and is one of Henze’s loveliest inspirations. The performances are well-prepared and virtuosically played, although the orchestral image given by the recording is at times a little twodimensional, particularly in Antifone, despite the nicely achieved – and well-balanced – separation between the different instrumental groups. The conductor Peter Ruzicka is probably best known in Britain as a composer (Wergo 6518 2 is devoted entirely to his works and several others have appeared on disc from various companies) as well as an advocate of the music of the Swede, Allan Pettersson. However, Ruzicka was a pupil of Henze for a time and has audibly maintained a working knowledge of his erstwhile teacher’s music over the years. (His interviewing of Henze stands as the booklet note.) Ruzicka’s interpretations emphasize the dichotomies in Henze’s style as much as the syntheses, giving the music an unusually vital edginess. The way he steers a course through the bold textures of Scorribanda is impressive, as is the clarity of ensemble in
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Antifone. The account of the First Concerto is like-
wise exemplary, although coming after the more advanced manners of its later companion pieces it seems stylistically at odds with them. It might have been more satisfying to place the Concerto second and conclude with Antifone (since Scorribanda makes such a good opener) or another Henze work – Heliogabalus Imperator , perhaps, or the more recent Fraternité? There would have been room – the whole disc runs for less than 51 minutes. Guy Rickards
KLETZKI: Symphony No. 3, In Memoriam; Concertino
for Flute and Orchestra. Sharon Bezaly (fl), Norrköping Symphony Orchestra c. Thomas Sanderling. BIS CD1399.
Paul Kletzki (1900–1973) is today remembered as a conductor, mainly for his recordings of Beethoven and Mahler with the Philharmonia in the 1950s. His work as a composer had nearly disappeared completely until his widow at last opened a trunk containing his scores, all of which were written prior to 1942. (Kletzki himself had not dared to open it since it was returned to him after the war.) Hardly any of Kletzki’s music was performed in his lifetime and he effectively disowned it, believing it lost: he did nothing to revive it despite a series of distinguished posts as music director on both sides of the Atlantic in the post-war years. His output was modest but of considerable substance, as this CD – the first in a series – reveals. Among various other works there are three symphonies and concertos for piano, violin and flute. The conductor Thomas Sanderling has told me that Kletzk i was so deeply affected by the war, the Holocaust and its impact on Jewish art that he lost all heart for composition. His mother, father and sister were murdered by the Nazis. Although in the 1920s and 30s he was a favourite of Wilhelm Fürtwängler, Kletzki had already fled three times by the time his Symphony No. 3 was completed in October 1939. It is, as Sanderling says, very much in the Mahler/Strauss tradition of music as a personal statement of expression rather than a ‘painting’ or creative art for art’s sake. Kletzki’s style, as shown immediately in the arresting opening of the 45-minute-long Symphony, is in line with other mid-European 20th-century composers such as Krenek and Hindemith, Karol Rathaus, his fellow Pole and near contemporary Alexandre Tansman, and maybe even the Honegger (of ‘Di Tre Re’). In some
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ways too, in my view, the music anticipates a pulsating American idiom associated most closely with William Schuman and Peter Mennin. But Kletzki’s technique is by any measure astonishing and is extremely advanced, the first movement’s sonata form marked by dense and powerful harmonies, complex counterpoint and brilliantly conceived orchestration. Sanderling says that the work was extremely demanding for the Norrköping orchestra, especially the brass with many prolonged, intensive episodes affording little respite and requiring long and exact preparation by every performer. The work’s overall tragic aspect and its subtitle In memoriam seem to serve as a metaphor of the disorder, chaos and tragedy about to descend on the whole continent, but there is nothing disorderly or chaotic about its own structure. The second movement is a long elegy of tortured chromaticism which gradually escalates into a furious cri de coeur . Like the other movements the scherzo, described by the (very explicit and well researched) sleeve-notes as a nine-part rondo, is as sharply focussed as nine telescopes turned on the same constellation. Indeed, everything always remains in focus whether inside out, upside down or back to front, so clear is Kletzki’s vision of the music. The relatively brief (16-minute) Flute Concertino (1940) is rather lighter in texture than the Symphony and the mood consequently less weighty and more transparent, but the formidable technique once again prevails. There can only be the most enthusiastic of welcomes for these very remarkable discoveries, together with gratitude that such a brilliant talent has lost none of its sheen despite six decades of slumber. Bret Johnson
GEORGE CRUMB: The Complete Piano Music. Makrokosmos 1; Makrokosmos 2; Five Pieces for Piano; Gnomic Variations; Processional; A Little Suite for Christmas. Philip Mead (pno). Metier MSV CD92067 (2-
CD Set).
George Crumb is one of the most original of all contemporary American composers. His sound, his ‘voice’ is uniquely his own. Yet despite the adventurousness of his compositional technique, Crumb’s music embodies no grand modernist agenda. This music is deeply personal, a nostalgic testament to Crumb’s experiences as a youth growing up in Charleston, West Virginia. In some cases the references to these early years are quite explicit. Crumb’s chamber music, for example, often incorporates folk instruments such as the
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musical saw and banjo. Even when folk instruments are not used, however, Crumb finds a way to express the regional flavor of his boyhood home. Indeed, it is, perhaps, the pursuit of such an aesthetic that leads Crumb to the inside of the piano, to the strings themselves, which the pianist is asked to probe and pluck like the strings of a guitar. Crumb’s music has been performed the world over. Philip Mead’s two-CD set of the complete piano music is the first of its kind to have been produced in the United Kingdom. The collection comprises Makrokosmos, Volumes 1 and 2, the Five Pieces for Piano, Gnomic Variations, Processional, and A Little Suite for Christmas. These compositions, written over a period of 20 years, provide ample evidence to demonstrate that Crumb’s unique style emerged almost immediately, with its mature, full-blown character already intact. Central to Crumb’s style is what David Burge describes as his ‘extreme sensitivity to the beauty and expressive power of small units of sound, including those produced by unconventional means’.1 Hence, sound itself, and not merely the relations between sound-events, is elevated to a principal role in Crumb’s music. Mead brings a virtuosity to these works that is not often heard. Indeed, the general execution of the pieces in these recordings leans more towards a Beethovenian mode of expression and less toward the light, ethereal sound most often associated with Crumb’s music. Such an approach is especially suited to works like the Five Pieces for Piano, the only example of absolute music in the entire collection. Mead’s impeccable performance of these pieces is masterful and dramatic. The flamboyance of the thirty-second-note fioraturas in Makrokosmos, Volume 1, movement. 2, moreover, adds an exuberance to these passages which is thrilling to hear. Mead’s performance of the seventh movement of Makrokosmos, Volume 2, Tora! Tora! Tora! is also particularly well-executed. In other cases, however, the idiosyncratic features of Mead’s technique seem to overshadow the expressive nature of Crumb’s relaxed and intimate settings. Mead often plays rhythms with machine-like precision, even in unmeasured passages. This causes certain pieces – such as the f irst movement of Makrokosmos Volume 2 – to seem somewhat mechanical. In fact, the relentless precision with which Mead performs all dynamics and rhythms is rather confusing, especially in light of the fact that his liner notes reflect an acute aware-
ness of the sensitivity Crumb’s settings require. The ffff of the poco allargando near the end of the Twin Suns ( Makrokosmos, Volume 2, movement 4), for example, while technically correct, seems excessive given the subdued character of the piece in general. In addition, some of the pieces seem hurried, with one effect running into the next. Thus, Mead’s performances, while accurate, sometimes tend to take on a mechanistic demeanor, obscuring the dark, mysterious ambience Crumb is so well known for. Mead’s interpretations of Crumb’s piano compositions are punctilious and, perhaps, somewhat overscrupulous. At the same time, they are polished and even brilliant in terms of their execution. While perhaps missing some of the finer points of Crumb’s intensely personal style, this CD set brings a fresh perspective to Crumb’s music and will undoubtedly help to broaden the awareness of his music. Edward Pearsall
Psanterin: Anthology of Israeli Music for Piano. Liora Ziv-Li, Allan Sternfield, Ora Rotem-Nelken, Herut Israeli, Tomer Lev, Michal Tal, Natasha Tadson, Yuval Admoni, Astrith Baltsan, Allon Goldstein (pianists). Israel Music Center IMCD: 104–112 (9-CD set) produced by The Israel Composers League and the Israeli Music Center (IMC), 55 Begin Rd, Tel Aviv, Israel. (Tel/fax:00-972-(0)3-562 1282. Email:
[email protected]
The American musicologist Philip V Bohlman (Professor of Music and of the Humanities at the University of Chicago) has written: Historical musicologists already speak of ‘schools’ of Israeli composition, ethnomusicologists analyse and computerise Israeli folk song, and popular-music scholars speculate why no other ‘European’ country wins the annual Eurovision Song Contest as frequently as Israel. That a national music is extraordinarily important to Israel almost goes without saying. But, in fact, one pauses before saying it, because it would be impossible to say exactly what Israeli music is. 2
This nine-CD Anthology, Psanterin, the first of its kind, helps to answer Bohlman’s riddle, as its unique survey of the field of Israeli music of four generations underlines the Israeli composers’ evolving quest for a balance between local and international idioms, and past and present traditions, resulting in a distinctive aesthetic premised on varying admixtures of East and West. 3 The 2
1
David Burge, ‘Annotated Chronological List of Crumb’s Works.’ in Don Gillespie (ed.), George Crumb, Profile of a Composer (New York: C. F. Peters Corporation, 1986), p. 104.
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3
‘Afterword’ to Israeli Folk Music, ed. Hans Nathan, with a Foreword and Afterword by Philip Bohlman (Madison, Wisconsin: A-R Editions, Inc, 1994), p.54. The nine-CD set is $95 (plus $5 post); a single CD is $15 ( plus $3 post).
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music, much of it available here for the first time, is performed by an excellent team of ten pianists from different generations who share virtuosity and, more importantly, a deep dedication to and involvement in the music. As a collection of 72 works by 56 composers (including nine women composers), the anthology provides a valuable and much-needed resource for performers, and educationalists, through which to survey the diversity of Israeli music over a span of over 70 years (1923–1993) and to assimilate the range of idioms and techniques which makes it possible to assess the important Israeli contribution to contemporary music. Of course there is an element of selectivity, as in fact the piano repertoire available includes over 400 possible works by over 120 composers, yet clearly the project, which has taken over a decade to complete, represents an admirable initiative to stimulate greater awareness of a vibrant musical culture. The selection begins with a 1923 work by Joel Engel (1888–1927), often regarded as the founder of the Israeli style, since he was the leader of the St Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music before emigrating in 1924. A student of Taneyev and a member of Rimsky-Korsakov’s circle, Engel accompanied Solomon Ansky on his pre-WWI ethnographic expeditions around Jewish communities in the Russian ‘Pale of Settlement’, collecting a vast amount of folk music (some still in Russian archives) which he later arranged and published with the Yuval publishing house he founded. Liora Ziv-Li’s performance of the short folk dances which constitute Engel’s Five Klavierstücke op. 19 (1923) show his style to be somewhat in the idiom of Mussorgsky or RimskyKorsakov, with augmented intervals and polytonal chords which occasionally pre-echo later Israeli music. They are full of verve and atmosphere, even if rather more straightforward in style than the more radical members of the St Petersburg group, such as Joseph Achron, Michael Gnessin, and Alexander Weprik – as well as Joachim Stuschewsky, cellist of the Kolisch Quartet in Vienna before he emigrated to Palestine, two of whose programmatic piano works, influenced by the Second Viennese School, are featured here. The pluralistic culture that developed even at the earliest stage of Israeli society is described in a famous line by critic-composer Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and publisher, ‘From every corner, very different stones are brought in, stones which constitute the structure of our music’. This sampling of composers of that generation amply highlights the division that eventually emerged between those who espoused what became
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known as the ‘Mediterranean School’, and those drawn to a more Austro-German modernist idiom. The former responded to the demands of the collective vision and, like American music of that period, idealized the rural, pastoral elements of Jewish folklore – a radical new aesthetic based on an East-West synthesis. This may be seen in the music of its main visionary, Paul Ben-Haim (1897–1984). Born in Munich as Paul Frankenburger, Ben-Haim studied at the Munich Academy of Music, and worked as Bruno Walter’s assistant at the Bavarian Opera and music director at the Augsburg opera, until Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933 cut short his career and forced him to immigrate to Palestine. It was a period in which he was exploring the use of Jewish themes and folklore, as shown by his 1933 oratorio Joram and Suite No.1, op.20a for piano, in which the slow movement quotes the Yemenite folksong, ‘Ali Be’er’ (a song also set by Paul Dessau). In Ben-Haim’s early Israeli works, there is a clear emphasis too on French postImpressionist methods, Debussy and Ravel, in the use of pentatonic modes and exotic orientalism including a good deal of parallel motion of perfect intervals, with inspiration derived from the rhythmic patterns of Arabic dance and modern Palestinian ‘Hora’. This radically new style is evident in his Five Pieces for Piano, op.34 of 1943, brilliantly played here by Liora Ziv-Li – notably the first piece, ‘Pastorale’, a reworking of the first movement of the Suite no.2, the first piano work Ben-Haim composed in his new surroundings. It weaves a delicate melodic tracery with whole-tone scales over a sustained backdrop, with hints of shepherd pipes, plaintive cantillation phrases and fragmentary dance rhythms. The set is crowned by a ‘Toccata’, which Ziv-Li drives with thrilling momentum, somewhat reminiscent of Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, coloured by strumming repeated-note effects and buoyant Yemenite dance figures. Her performance ranks extremely well compared to two others (Gila Goldstein on Centaur CRC 2506 and the renowned Pnina Salzman on the ‘Music in Israel’ series MII – CD-19 of the Israel Music Institute). The unique amalgam of East and West matured further in the Piano Sonata op.49, composed in Israel in 1954, dedicated to Menahem Pressler, and here performed vividly by Allan Sternfield. Tomer Lev also gives an evocative performance of BenHaim’s final work for piano, Chamsin (1972), a more reflective piece in ternary form in which the outer sections are built on a stark ground bass with melismatic motifs in the melody, leading to a central cantorial-style improvisatory meditation above a pedal point.
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In comparison to Ben-Haim’s music, recordings of that of his contemporaries is far scarcer, and their inclusion here all the more laudable, as for instance Erich Walter Sternberg (1891–1974), a student of Hugo Leichtentritt, who settled in Palestine in 1931, and whose Twelve Tribes of Israel (1942) – broadcast live on 15 May 1948 to celebrate the new State – was severely criticized in 1942 for not being nationalistic enough. Sternberg’s Capriccio (1952), performed energetically by Allan Sternfield, is somewhat poised between the influences of Richard Strauss and Shostakovich. Similarly, one of the most popular works, The Semitic Suite, by Alexander Uryah Boskovich, offers a lucid perspective on the Mediterranean style of which he was one of the prime ideologues. Born in 1907 in Transylvania, Boskovich came to Tel-Aviv in 1938 and died there in 1964. His aesthetic credo was for the artist to be a collective spokesman, avoid personal Romantic expression and be inspired by the static desert landscapes and dynamic nature of Hebrew and Arabic languages and musics. It is not surprising Boskovich was held in high esteem by his pupils, including the Arab composer and writer Habib Hassan Touma. The 1945 Semitic Suite, based on the style of middle-eastern Jewish dances, later became popular in orchestral garb, and is here played with panache by Ziv-Li in its 1948 piano solo version (a later two-piano version is often performed by his wife Miriam Boskovich). Even more accessibly folkloristic was Mark Lavry (1903–1967), born in Riga, who worked in Berlin from 1926 as director of Laban’s dance theatre and as a film composer. In 1933 he returned to Riga but immigrated to Palestine in 1935, directing the Palestine Radio – later ‘Kol Yisrael’ (The Voice of Israel) radio. Lavry composed the first-ever ‘Israeli’ opera, Dan the Guard, and his simpler popular style is evinced in the Five Country Dances (1952) here played with aplomb by Allan Sternfield. The opposite aesthetic pole to Ben-Haim is represented by Josef Tal, who never rejected the German modernist tradition in which he was nurtured: his Sonata (1950) receives a powerful interpretation here from the young Allon Goldstein. Born Josef Grünthal in 1910 in Pinne (near Poznán, in what is now Poland), Tal studied under Hindemith in Berlin (he recalls playing harp in Gurrelieder under Schoenberg’s baton), and emigrated to Palestine in 1934, where he became a Professor and Director at the Jerusalem Academy of Music, and Director of the Hebrew University’s Electro-Acoustics department. Nevertheless Tal was fervently interested in Jewish themes and oriental elements, and searched for a means to
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integrate these within his avant-garde and serial style, as in his First Symphony (1953), a powerfully atonal work which yet uses a Babylonian theme from Idelsohn’s Thesaurus of Jewish music. Similarly ‘Ostinato’, the slow movement of Tal’s Sonata – the first piano work he composed in Israel – places the Hebrew pioneer folksong ‘Rahel’ (by Yehuda Sharett) in the bass while the upper voice builds a highly expressive structure, based on quartal harmony, to climactic dissonant counterpoint, with a return to tranquility at the close. In contrast to the pastoral musings of the Mediterranean style, one senses in Tal’s work a biting struggle between East and West within the very fabric of the music, keenly highlighted in Allon Goldstein’s engaging interpretation. That aesthetic tension, between the regional and the international tendencies of the East-West synthesis, still colours Israeli music, but is especially well illustrated in the music of the early émigré generation, including Joseph Kaminski, Emanuel Amiran-Pougatchov, Yardena Alotin, Haim Alexander, Menahem Avidom and Hanoch Jacoby, and the more modernist camp of Ödön Partos, Abel Ehrlich and Modercai Seter. Their diversity of styles emerges throughout these fascinating recordings, allowing stylistic comparisons which make this anthology a particularly unique and useful document. The aesthetic issues stand out in particular relief in the music of the second-generation composers, those either born in Israel or who came as young children from Europe, who sought a more complex synthesis of East and West. Their awareness of middle-eastern idioms drew on biblical cantillation, eastern Jewish folklore and Arabic melisma and modes. All of them, especially Tsippi Fleischer (b.1946), who is here included, and Ami Maayani (b.1936), who is not, explored and exploited Arabic idioms and techniques, such as the maqam (microtonal modes) and taksim (rhythmic improvisation). Amongst the important works by the major composers of the second generation featured is the Sonata No.2, Epitaph by Tzvi Avni (b. Germany 1927), which fuses avantgarde techniques with traditional elements and a programmatic idea drawn from Hassidic literature. The piece reflects the transformation in Avni’s style from his early years in the ‘Mediterranean style’, following a decisive period at the Princeton Electronic Music Center that awakened him to the Darmstadt school and electro-acoustics. Avni’s later music, including Triptych (1993), and From There and Then (1998), awaits recording. A similar blend of rhapsodic cantillation with an avant-garde texture also infuses the music of Ben-Zion Orgad (b.1926), who
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came from Germany in 1933, studied with BenHaim, Tal, and also Copland in the USA, and became Supervisor of Music Education for many years. His Two Preludes in Impressionistic Mood (1967) is performed evocatively by Ora RotemNelken. Her CD claims, curiously, to present those works which ‘ignore the Middle Eastern and Oriental flavour and are written in Western style’, yet in my opinion these works highlight the latent eastern potential of avant-garde techniques, and consciously exploit Jewish and oriental elements. This is the case, particularly, in the Journal from Sidi-Bou-Said by Andre Hajdu, a Hungarian émigré and former student of Kodály and Messiaen, and in Furious Rondo – El Oudh (1953) by Abel Ehrlich, in which the Arabic lute referred to in its title is colourfully conveyed in the pianistic textures. Apart from this comment, for the most part the erudite sleeve-notes which accompany all nine discs, by scholars such as Jehoash Hirschberg and Ronit Seter, are impressive and form an invaluable and authoritative source of historical background and critical observation. The Anthology includes several of the major works commissioned for the Artur Rubinstein International Piano Competition, amongst them the texturally innovative Alliterations by Mark Kopytman, one of the main second-generation
composers who came from Russia in 1972, as well as works by younger composers, Moshe Zorman’s jazz-inspired Homage a Gershwin, and Ron Weidberg’s flamboyant Impromptu No.2. These works and others by the younger generation highlight how far the range of stylistic possibilities had widened by the 1980s; the issue was no longer not how to ‘create’ a style, but to express their own identity through the influences around them. In contrast to the earlier generations who forged a new path and consolidated the East-West synthesis, there is in the music of the third and fourth generations a new sense of looking outward, of engaging in the international arena, yet always acutely aware of the distinctive influence of local and regional styles. This is shown in How Far East How Further West? by Yinam Leef, (b.1953) one of the first of his generation to pursue postgraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania with Richard Wernick, George Rochberg and George Crumb, and later at Tanglewood with Berio; Haim Permont and Oded Zehavi (not featured here) followed in his tracks. A similar fresh approach is evidenced in the works presented here by Betty Olivero (a Berio student), Noa Guy, Arie Shapira, whose radical Off Piano explores a Ferneyhough-like world of nuances, Dan Yuhas, Menachem Zur, and the
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younger post-‘67 generation of Gil Shohat and Israeli music thus encapsulates a quintessential Ronn Yedidia. Even in their most recent abstract concern, the balance between local and internaand avant-garde works there are various, unex- tional idioms, and past and present traditions, pected expressions of the symbiosis, with either which also colours the contemporary music scene overt or veiled allusions to Jewish heritage and in a global context. In that respect this Anthology Middle-Eastern and oriental elements. is a welcome and enriching step towards the deepInevitably there are some understandable er appreciation not only of Israeli music but its omissions, such as Stefan Wolpe, who though liv- place in the wider sphere of contemporary musiing in ‘Palestine’ and teaching the younger cal trends in general. A project of this scope and generation of Israeli composers, found it more quality takes much time, effort and determination fruitful to move to America; moreover his works – qualities for which much credit is due to the have been recorded by pianists such as David Israel Composer’s League. The pianists bring Holzman (Bridge Records). Similarly with com- artistic excellence and imagination to the chalposers of the Russian school who ‘passed through’ lenging and highly virtuoso repertoire, and thus Palestine, eventually settling in the USA, such as offer a crucial contribution to the enjoyment and Joseph Achron and Lazare Saminsky; but it was communicative appeal of the music. While one perhaps odd to omit those younger composers may look forward to additions to the basic corpus who grew up or were educated in Israel but even- presented here, its extension to different genres, tually settled in the USA such as Shulamit Ran and and its contextualization in relation to contem Jan Radzynski (see my interview with Ran in porary piano music in the regional and Tempo Vol. 58, No.227). Other omissions of major international arena, this Anthology certainly recomposers of the second generation include presents a promising and enriching benchmark for Yehezkel Braun, Ami Maayani and Noam Sherriff, the future. and of the prolific spirits of the younger generaMalcolm Miller tion Oded Zehavi, Aharon Harlap, Sally Pinkus, Rami Bar-Niv, Oded Assaf, Reuben Seroussi, Hagar Kadima, Bardanshvili, Lior Navok and others. The later works of some earlier composers, as FEINBERG: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1, op.1 (1915)1, 2, op.2 well as many pedagogic compositions, are similar- (1915–16)2, 3, op.3 (1916)2, 4, op.6 (1918)1, 5, op.10 ly neglected. These omissions are probably due to (1920–21)1, 6, op.13 (1923)2. 1Nikolaos Samaltanos, space rather than to any critical agenda, though 2Christophe Sirodeau (pnos). BIS-CD-1413. they might have been mentioned within the FEINBERG: Piano Sonatas Nos. 7, op.21 (1924–28) 2, sleeve-notes as a point of information. op.21a (1933–34)2, 9, op.29 (1939) 1, 10, op.30 Nevertheless this does not detract from the main 8, 1, 11, op.40 (1952) 1, 12, op.48 (1962) 2. task, and but rather whets one’s appetite for more (1940–44) 1Nikolaos Samaltanos, 2Christophe Sirodeau recordings and anthologies. However there is a (pnos). BIS-CD-1414. great deal that is included, and if it is not a comprehensive archive, the Anthology does succeed in What a lively, humane yet recondite sensibility achieving a representative overview of a valuable, inhabits these works! Nikolaos Samaltanos and and ever expanding repertoire, ideal as a reference Christophe Sirodeau have already performed tool for scholars and performers alike. pianistic prodigies for BIS in advocacy of their Throughout the Anthology one senses how far great Greek compatriot Skalkottas; here they turn the beneficial influence of each generation on its to a significant Russian-Jewish pianist-composer successors is keenly felt and an intimate relation- whose music was long sidelined. Born in 1890, ship and unanimity of purpose and identity from 1922 until his death 40 years later Samuil thereby fostered. Certainly there is a wide stylistic Evgenievitch Feinberg was professor of piano at distance between Ben-Haim or Boskovich and the Moscow Conservatory. Purely as a pianist and Shapira and Shohat, equivalent to the distance pedagogue he was a towering figure in the Russian between the English composers Holst or Vaughan tradition. But the late-Imperial / early Soviet Williams and James Macmillan and Mark- piano repertoire has lately been opening out in the Anthony Turnage. Yet each generation is most fascinating manner with the rehabilitation of grappling with similar aesthetic issues – the assim- such figures as Roslavets, Lourié, Alexandrov and ilation of diverse traditions, even if the definition Catoire – and Feinberg (who has also been chamof those traditions has expanded and become pioned recently by Jonathan Powell) proves to be a more complex. While each generation has had to major member of that company. Presented confront new issues in its quest, in a sense the together on record for the first time as a complete, searching is itself at the heart of an Israeli style. coherent cycle, his twelve Piano Sonatas (half of
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them receiving their first recordings) reveal a musical thinker and keyboard poet of impressive stature, his ideas all the more important for their sometimes elusive nature. Feinberg’s first six sonatas, composed 1915–23, manifest parallels to those of Alexandrov, Miaskovsky or Medtner in the same period. All in a single movement apart from the 3-movement No.3 (which has a funeral-march slow movement and throws most of its weight into a massive, headlong finale), the sonatas start by bearing the strong imprint of Scriabin – almost, it seems, as a logical continuation of his last three sonatas. But they move towards a sure individuality of expression, as in the uneasily fluttering and swirling textures of the Fourth (dedicated to Miaskovsky) and the ‘Schumannesque’ Fifth with its kaleidoscopic changes of mood. The climax of this period is Sonata No.6, a superbly intense work which Feinberg premièred at the 1925 Venice Festival: its extreme chromaticism and continuous motivic development make his declared admiration for Schoenberg perfectly explicable. In fact its basis, arrived at independent of Schoenberg, is claimed to be a 12-tone row, as well as the often-audible BACH motif. The creative fire that infuses these works is unmistakable and they are also music of the highest virtuoso standard. These young Greek pianists, both Moscow-trained, give a dazzling, eloquent account of it. It is however in the second disc that their advocacy bears the most fascinating fruit. One had read that Feinberg’s last six piano sonatas, composed over a much longer span (nearly 40 years, whereas Nos.1–6 emerged in eight), showed a retreat from the radicalism of his first six. Yet here is no dull descent into Soviet orthodoxy, despite all the dangers that beset the Jewish pedagogue in Moscow throughout the Stalinist era. Certainly the almost atonal opening of the Seventh Sonata of 1924– 8 (which, like the Eighth of 1933–4, was felt too dangerous to publish in Feinberg’s lifetime) is the most obviously ‘modernist’ music on this disc. Yet the complex and concentrated later sonatas of the war years and after, with their wider range of tonal reference and occasional shafts of Bach-like chorale writing (Feinberg was a notable transcriber of JSB) offer no comforting emotional clichés. Even at their most virtuosic these works remain troubled, intimate, confiding. It is almost impossible to imagine that such a composer could perpetrate anything so public in address as a piano concerto: yet Feinberg wrote three, and I would very much like to hear them. (Christoph Sirodeau has the First in his repertoire, so we may hope that BIS is contemplating their release.)
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This music, so daringly compressed and so deeply, so honestly complex in its expression, reflects a very high degree of culture. Technically and emotionally the sonatas seem one of the summits of Russian piano composition – and this even though it could well be argued that very little of Feinberg’s basic material is especially attractive or memorable in itself. (The Eighth Sonata’s berceuse-like Andante is a notable exception.) The single-movement sonatas of Scriabin and Medtner again come to mind, but Feinberg has outpaced them into an imaginative region devoid of illusion, even perhaps of hope; a region of which he strives to communicate a pitilessly exact account. All six works are striking in their way and all demand repeated hearings to yield their full expressive measure. I would single out for comment the torrential, flickering toccata-like impulse of the Ninth Sonata (1939).4 Also the Eleventh (1952), composed at the height of the post-Zhdanov terror (when Feinberg too was denounced for ‘formalism’). This Sonata brings several contrasting musical characters to painful half-birth yet discovers a tragic eloquence in their very incompleteness – perhaps, as Sirodeau says in his notes, this is not an entirely successful work, but it exercises a powerful fascination. And finally the valedictory Twelfth Sonata (1962), Feinberg’s last work, whose first movement grew out of an unsuccessful attempt to write something simple enough for a children’s album. 5 This work’s deeply elegiac finale, constantly evoking and playing upon the main theme of Brahms’s op.117 no.3, ends in a limpid, mysterious harmonic noman’s-land derived from one of Feinberg’s Lermontov settings. Altogether these discs are something of a revelation of a composer whose qualities and appeal derive not from a use of folk-derived colour or externalized musical symbolism, but a consummate compositional and instrumental technique allied to the exploration of a highly personal imaginative world and an unfailing sense of responsibility to the potential and implications of his material. These are rare qualities in any age. Calum MacDonald
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I am confident that at least half a dozen readers will know what I mean to convey when I liken this work to another headlong single-movement structure conceived as if in one breath – the Seventh Sonata of Harold Truscott. Not but Feinberg is by some way the subtler composer. 5 He made recompense with an entire book of children’s pieces before going on to complete the sonata.
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been for him over these past 30 years. Indeed, he ROGER SMALLEY: Poles Apart and other chamber has thrown off the spectre of Stockhausen and works. Continuum Ensemble. NMC DO 83. seemingly found himself. Since his move to Australia in the mid-1970’s, we see and hear far less than we ought to in this country of Roger Smalley, both as composer and pianist. NMC’s new recording of his recent cham ber music is to be welcomed, therefore, especially when performed and recorded with the empathy and commitment displayed by pianist Douglas Finch and the Continuum Ensemble. Smalley’s work for two pianos, Accord (1974–75) consolidated a period of working within an expanded sense of modality/ tonality, by mainly deriving his material from quasi or actual harmonic series (cf. Beat Music, Strata). In many of his pieces from the past two decades, however, the source material is based upon quotations and harmonic precedents encountered in music by Chopin and Brahms. Smalley’s engagement with these composers is certainly no fashionable, postmodernist whim and should not really come as any surprise – even the early orchestral Gloria Tibi Trinitas 1 (1965/69), although inhabiting a different soundworld , is dedicated to the memory of Busoni. Increasingly, his music has seemed to function as commentaries upon favourite pieces and has resulted in works that are both invigorating and immediate in impact. Three of the five pieces on this disc utilize material by Chopin, namely three Mazurkas: op.24 no.4 in B flat minor ( Chopin Variations), op.52 no.2 in A flat (Piano Trio) and op.50 no.3 in C sharp minor (third movement of Poles Apart ). The Variations for solo piano are a probing and trenchant reaction to the wedge-shapes of the Chopin original, whilst in the Passacaglia movement of the Piano Trio, Smalley achieves a beautiful, almost late-Beethovenian sense of poise and restraint. (The final movement, incidentally, opens with a gesture which is virtually identical to that which launches the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra ). The remaining two works look to Brahms for their inspiration: in the case of the Trio for clarinet, viola and piano, an allusion to the first variation of the finale of the Sonata in Eb, op.120, whilst Crepuscule for piano quartet quarries its material from the Intermezzo in E minor, op.l 16 no.5. This somewhat enigmatic piece elicits a wide palette and variety of textures from the four instruments. Roger Smalley’s affectionate appropriation of past masters in these five chamber works serve to remind us of just how liberating Australia has
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Richard Leigh Harris
IAN WILSON: from the Book of Longing ; BIG; Drive; Verschwindend; Spilliaert’s Beach; For Eileen, after rain; Lim; A Haunted Heart . Hugh Tinney (pf), Catherine
Leonard (vn). Riverrun RVRCD65.
This CD is a welcome selection of Ian Wilson’s chamber works for violin and piano. Wilson’s growing reputation has thus far been built on concertos, orchestral works and the recent chamber opera Hamelin. Indeed, the most significant work on the CD, Lim, has its origins in an orchestral commission. Written for Hugh Tinney, who performs the piece here, it is in fact the lush, melifluous solo part from the concerto for piano and strings, Limena, and was first conceived as a stand-alone piece before Wilson added a characteristic orchestral halo. Lim is one of two pieces written especially for the performers on this CD: the other is from the Book of Longing , which was commissioned by the violinist Catherine Leonard. It opens the disc with a spacious processional, full of subtle details in the violin writing. This soon develops into a series of short tangos before returning to the processional theme, and ending with a gentle percussive strumming of the tango rhythm. The piece was inspired by the temptations of Christ in the desert, and Wilson uses the tangos, Milton-like, to give both distance and seduction to Satan’s blandishments. While never an eclectic composer, Wilson uses a varied musical style that fluidly changes mood and texture in short spaces of time. This is perhaps a result of his preference for modes as compositional tools rather than harmonic fields, and is supported by his careful and inventive ear. The remaining pieces on this CD bear testament to this. BIG (composed in 1991) is the earliest and most muscular of these, and betrays Wilson’s early post-minimalist leanings. While this is an aesthetic he has largely moved away from, BIG retains connexions with later pieces in its use of a broad recurring motif – also a feature of Lim. Of the others Drive, an arrangement of a work for soprano saxophone, is the most varied, developing from sparse opening gestures into an extended, ostinato-based aria. Both Leonard and Tinney have strong associations with Wilson’s music (the concerto Messenger was also written for Leonard), and both render the
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precise lyricism of his later pieces to great effect. While the written-in resonances of Wilson’s orchestral works may not be present in these chamber pieces, this is compensated by a greater clarity of line that is no less satisfying. Tim Johnson
LEE HYLA: Bass Clarinet Concerto 1; Trans; Violin
Concerto2. 1Tim Smith (bass cl), 2Laura Frautschi (vln), Boston Modern Orchestra Project c. Gil Rose. New World 80614-2
The American composer Lee Hyla (b. 1952) is one of an increasing number of modern Classical composers – not least from the Nordic world, e.g. Mikael Edlund and Anders Hillborg – whose roots lie in the world of rock music. Hyla was ‘a practicing [sic] rocker’ who also worked in new music ensembles, activities conducted over a bedrock of classical studies at the New England Conservatory (where he is now Chairman of the composition department) and SUNY, Stony Brook. His individual style is eclectic, to say the least, the basis being free atonality; he delights in bringing together seemingly unrelated elements from his diverse background. Take the finale of the Second String
Quartet (1985), for example, where a modal melody sounding like a modern descendant of Vaughan Williams’s lark boogies along with a quotation from a pop song by Booker T and the MGs. This disc is not New World’s first excursion into Hyla’s music: they released five of his works in 1996 under the title We Speak Etruscan – from the bracing duo for baritone saxophone and bass clarinet of four years before – and also featuring his Second and Third String Quartets (the latter composed in 1989), an ensemble piece for 12 players entitled Pre-Pulse Suspended (1984) and the Second Piano Concerto (1991). At just under 20 minutes’ duration, this latter was at that time Hyla’s most extended instrumental work, and of its companions only the Second Quartet made it past a quarter of an hour. Although such brevity might in some creators be evidence of a shortness of compositional breath, this is not the case with Hyla (any more than it is with, say, Jón Leifs or Leifur Thorarinsson) – as the Third Quartet amply confirms. Just one piece on New World’s new disc surpasses that time-span: the Violin Concerto of 2001, which runs in this recording to over 24 minutes. Unlike the Second Piano Concerto, which was cast in four movements, the Violin Concerto is in one extended span. Part of the melodic
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b o l d . . . d a r i n g . . . u n i q u e . . . a r e y o u ?
hcmf www.hcmf.co.uk
19 - 28 November The internationally renowned Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival presents a stunning programme of contemporary music, dance, film and music theatre from around the world Pioneering Creativity Over 50 events: 22 world premieres, 35 UK premieres and 4 new commissions
Featured Composers Kevin Volans, Richard Ayres, Rebecca Saunders, Richard Rijnvos, Howard Skempton, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies
International Highlights Klangforum Wien, China Found Music Workshop, Oslo Sinfonietta, Jonny Axelsson, SISU, Alter Ego, Contempoartensemble, Ives Ensemble, Musikfabrik, Ictus Ensemble, Asko
Music Theatre Aldeburgh Almeida Opera's The lo Passion (music by Sir Harrison Birtwistle), Music Theatre Wales' The Piano Tuner (music by Nigel Osborne)
Jazz Dhafer Youssef, Evan Parker, Barry Guy, Paul Lytton
Festival Finale Asko and EXAUDI perform UK premieres of Richard Ayres' Valentine Tregashian Considers .... and NONcerto for Horn.
For a Festival brochure: call 01484 425082 click www.hcmf.co.uk Box Office 01484 430528 (opens 18 September)
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material derives from a tune by the Arts Ensemble of Chicago, ‘Theme de Yoyo’ – well, its bass line, to be precise – as much as a motivic library as for the qualities of the bass itself. Motivic development is notable throughout, a particularly memorable example being the passage starting around the 6’30” mark and building to an impressive climax several minutes later. The emotional range of the music is very wide and the free-flowing structure makes this an unusually compelling work. In fact, I would go so far as to aver that this is one of the finest post-1945 violin concertos to have emerged from the United States. Laura Frautschi plays the taxing solo part sensitively and with a sweet tone. The other concerto featured is that for bass clarinet, written in 1988 and played here in a slightly revised form from 2001 by Tim Smith, for whom it was composed (and who played in three of the Hyla works on New World’s older release and recorded several others for the Avant label). The Bass Clarinet Concerto is in a single compact movement, over and done with in under 11 minutes, but packed with incident. Running through it is an old American country song, ‘Longest Train I Ever Saw’, though the writing seems to owe more to contemporary jazz than country and western. It is certainly extremely virtuosic – as Smith’s playing audibly confirms – as is the orchestration, which provides a rich background for the soloist to operate against. Between the two concerti comes a purely orchestral work, Trans (1996), an abstract threemovement suite in which the ‘importance of transformation of material as an ongoing concern’ is paramount, according to annotator Theodore Mook. It is a very effectively written work, expressionist in tone but not ‘aggressively so. It does not appear to have any extra-musical connotations (although Mook hints there are some for all three works) but does fall broadly into the traditional fast-slow-fast pattern, a short atmospheric central span being framed by two larger, faster ones, the finale having some lighter elements. While the music is not symphonic by any means, it does give a hint as to what a Hyla Symphony might sound like. The performances by the Boston Music Project are committed and well played under Gil Rose’s firm direction. New World’s sound is a touch harsh, but this suits the music and rather underscores the American accent. I am glad to have made this music’s acquaintance and hope New World will bring us some more Hyla in due time.
CORIGLIANO: Symphony No. 2; The Mannheim
Rocket. Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra c. John Storgårds. Ondine ODE10392 ROUSE: Violin Concerto1; Rapture; Der gerettete
Alberich2. 1Cho-Liang Lin (vln), 2Evelyn Glennie (perc),
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra c. Leif Segerstam. Ondine ODE10162 HIGDON: Concerto for Orchestra; City Scape. Atlanta
Symphony Orchestra c. Robert Spano. Telarc. CD80620 (Super Audio version SACD60620)
Where is American orchestral music heading? Recent discs by three composers attracting attention outside of their native country give some pointers. John Corigliano (b. 1938) is the most established: his Symphony No. 2 won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. Next in seniority is Christopher Rouse (b. 1949), while the music of Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962) is just beginning to be recorded. ‘Old’ Europe remains a potent influence on the first two – explicitly so in Rouse’s Wagnerhaunted Der gerettete Alberich, while it is the American but European-schooled trio of Copland, Bernstein and Barber (rather than Cage or Carter) who loom largest as native influences. Corigliano is the most serious and inward-looking of the three. Following on from his Grawemeyer award-winning Symphony No.1 (1990), which took the AIDS catastrophe as its theme, the Second (for strings, 2000), maintains a sombre atmosphere throughout its 45 minutes. The first of five movements (they have pointedly conventional titles: Prelude, Scherzo, Nocturne, Fugue, Postlude) puts the technique of spatial notation, whereby each player is given a small degree of improvisatory freedom, linking up with the others at defined points, to a familiar end. Emerging from the slow, sad haze of Corigliano’s writing are fragments of a dirge played in the style of a viol consort or glimpses of full-string plangencies that might even be Elgar. It is as if the Renaissance world, the era of Romanticism and our own time are connected by the same tragic sense. Bartók is the dominant influence in the scherzo, where manic off-beat driving rhythms are set against a jerky fragment played by four soloists. Beethoven is here too, in the fast parallel scurryings. The piece has, unsurprisingly, been adapted from Corigliano’s 1996 String Quartet; if not always successfully so. The mood of reflectiveness (let alone the references to earlier string quartets) is more suited to the intimacy of chamber music. Self-consciously lush string writing and the Guy Rickards ancient viol sound interrupt the scherzo’s central
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section: this is not polystylism à la Schnittke, but a palimpsest of approaches governed by moods of anger and mourning. After the Bartókian night-music of the third movement, the fourth is Corigliano’s unusual take on the fugue. Only one theme is used, but played asynchronously so that only rarely are the orchestral players in accord. Typically, though the fugue’s subject could be by Bach, the harrowing slow and emphatic climax is pure Corigliano – rooted in the formality of the string quartet’s European heritage, but with an undertow of Mahlerian agony. To complete the pantheon of great quartet-writing influences, the last movement’s insistent two-note falling phrase is very much in the spirit of Shostakovich. For all the Symphony’s faults (its quartet-like feel, indebtedness to other composers’ techniques, unrelieved melancholy) the piece communicates so powerfully that the composer’s reputation can only be enhanced. The coupling, The Mannheim Rocket , is a brief showpiece with bells and whistles – literally. Where Corigliano’s musical references are diverse and allusive, Rouse’s ‘Fantasy for solo percussion and orchestra’ Der gerettete Alberich (Alberich Saved) opens with a minute of music from the end of Götterdämmerung . The three-movement piece then goes on to explore ‘aspects of Alberich’s character’ in an imagined life after the time spent in Wagner’s opera. Rouse’s challenge is that, even with the armoury of percussion that he equips the always-enthusiastic Evelyn Glennie with, there is a tendency to abandon subtle characterization (not the percussion’s strong point in any case) in favour of the frenetic and virtuosic, as we get in the first movement, or else letting the soloist take a back seat while the orchestra carries the weight of the argument, allusions to the 19th century (as with Corigliano) never far away when dramatic gestures are needed. Wild and lively though the two outer movements are (in the third Rouse gives way to percussion’s natural tendencies and transforms Glennie into a rock-drummer), the best is the restrained slow second. A long ppp string note is held as the soloist, mostly on the marimba, has a chance to give life to a reflective Alberich before the Wagner horns intone the Dawn motif. Rouse’s extravert qualities and his penchant for very loud and emphatic writing are also heard his 1991 Violin Concerto with Cho-Liang Lin, who gave its première, as a fluent soloist. The second of the work’s two movements is an outgoing toccata that quotes from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphonies in a breezy, maverick manner that the soloist sustains right up to the surprising all-brass-and-bells crashing ending. The f irst-movement opening is more
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interesting, using the string section leaders to play as a quartet. Once again Romanticism seems Rouse’s touchstone of seriousness, but the violin’s singing line is a little too sweet and the tutti overscored. Nevertheless, there’s a wonderfully old-fashioned big tune in the middle of it all before a surprisingly low-key conclusion. If the Concerto lacks an underpinning emotional logic it at least – just as in the 13-minute showpiece Rapture (think Quiet City and early Nielsen) – holds the listener’s attention with its bravura surface. By contrast, Jennifer Higdon’s works that have appeared on disc to date sound all-American. The Concerto for Orchestra (2002) has five movements: the first is bright and open, the second (for strings) light and playful, the third (marked ‘mystical’) is homely. In the fourth vibraphones, crotales and other percussion instruments tock and glisten prettily until the bongos and drums muscle in. In the fifth, Higdon uses a timpani solo in an attempt to give propulsion to an otherwise featureless score. Even when the subject-matter is both personal and tragic – as in blue cathedral (1999, on Telarc CD80596), a short orchestral piece about the death of the composer’s brother – Higdon’s music eschews pathos and suffering altogether. The Concerto was commissioned by the Curtis Institute of Music and in a note about it Higdon writes ‘Curtis is a home of knowledge – a place to reach towards that beautiful expression of the soul that comes through music’. That prose style is highly reflective of the feel of Higdon’s compositions. The best movement in City Scape (2002), her portrait of Atlanta, is the third, where Higdon lets something unexpected and uncontrolled out from all the Coplandish pastoralism. One longs for the uncertainties of the European experience beneath the American polish. Robert Stein
MORTON GOULD: Symphony No. 2. HARBISON:
Cello Concerto1. STUCKY: Son et Lumière. GABRIEL GOULD: Watercolors2. 1David Finckel (vlc), 2Robert Sheena (cor anglais), Albany Symphony Orchestra c. David Alan Miller. Albany TROY 605. McKINLEY: Violin Concerto1; Symphony of Winds;
Sinfonie Concertante2. 1 Janet Packer (vln), Warsaw National Philharmonic c. Jerzy Svoboda, 2Silesian Philarmonic Orchestra c. Joel Suben. MMC 2119. McKINLEY: Wind, Fire, and Ice1; Mostly Mozart 2; Silent Whispers3. 1Victoria Griswold (pno), London Symphony Orchestra c. Roger Briggs, 2Royal Liverpool Philharmonic c. Gerard Schwarz, 3Warsaw Philharmonic c. Robert Black. MMC 2134.
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McKINLEY: Symphony No. 6, Prague1. STEWART: Scherzo. BIGGS: Salutation. ROSSI: Moon-Mirror . 1 Roman Janal (bar), Czech Radio Symphony c. Vladimir Valek. MMC 2123.
The three numbered Symphonies of Morton Gould were all written in the 1940s, a decade of great importance in American music. The Second Symphony (On Marching Tunes), first heard just before D-Day, is undoubtedly a ‘war’ symphony, both in context and idiom, but despite its rather jingoistic sub-title and occasional open-hearted exhilaration, this is a work of much greater depth than breadth. In the last movement, ‘Memorial’, especially, Gould finds a poignancy of utterance and sensibility which points the way towards the monumental Third Symphony (TROY 515) of 1947. Gould has long been type-cast as an essentially lightweight composer, but thanks to a recent biography by Peter Goodman (Amadeus Press, 2000) and the Albany Symphony (this is their third Gould CD) we are starting to evaluate him better as a serious symphonic artist, and these earlier pieces are revealing a real strength of character. John Harbison has written many fine concertos, most of which have been recorded; the Cello Concerto (1994) is both glorious and enigmatic. The nineties were a good decade for American Cello Concertos (including those by Rouse, Danielpour and Stephen Albert, to name a few). Harbison is an impressionist with the richest of palettes and the subtlest of ears; the nocturnal opening is eerily beautiful. The shorter pieces by Gabriel Gould (no relation to Morton) and Stephen Stucky, too, are pastel-shaded tableaux of a paler hue than Harbison but they fill up this fine CD very pleasantly. William Thomas McKinley (b 1938) recognized long ago that phenomenal talent and prodigious industry as a composer doesn’t get you recordings. So, in his case: you start your own record company – and publishing house. MMC Records have so far notched up over 120 releases, mainly orchestral and featuring music by many of McKinley’s pupils and contemporaries as well as, of course, his own works. Even so, small labels have to struggle against the demands of a marketing and publicity world hooked on big name artists and familiar repertoire. McKinley’s music is instantly recognizable: he has that dazzling American immediacy and spontaneity of character (as did Bernstein and Gould ). But your shades on and you become aware of a much more complex and structured architecture: a fascinating and unique blend of classical and romantic ideals. Perhaps his closest parallel is his teacher Gunther Schuller, also (like McKinley) a brilliant jazz musician drawn to the great models of the
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past: his Eine Kleine Posaunemusik pays a similar homage to that in Mostly Mozart (‘Mostly McKinley’ in this case, actually). The Violin Concerto (1995) is Prokofievian (redolent of Romeo and Juliet especially) but there is no way someone of McKinley’s strength of character is going to lose his identity to the Russian master in those gaunt, striding marches. You have what you get: a thrilling, arching romantic concerto, sumptuously orchestrated, cast in four movements equating to each of the four seasons. Wind, Fire and Ice (2000) brings out a diabolical streak in McKinley: the structures are looser and after a deceptively cool opening sun bursts of flame erupt amidst a maelstrom of clashing tonalities and surging primitivism. The sinuous, weaving thread of the piano holds the line through the complex orchestral labyrinth. Possibly Messiaen and Takemitsu heave into view occasionally here. In Silent Whispers (1992) the piano spins a web of broken chords through a glimmering orchestral spectrum. In the Sinfonie Concertante (1985) small groups of players discourse with full orchestra in a musical landscape
where ideas grow first separately and then simultaneously in a very ordered and disciplined way. But the most impressive essay here, in my view, is the Symphony No. 6, Prague (1990), at nearly 40 minutes McKinley’s largest work to date (other than his still unperformed Missa Futura of 1999). A deeply felt, tragic utterance of Mahlerian breadth, this symphony coheres through the long monumental opening theme, blown apart in one of the most amazing scherzos since Shostakovich Eighth, and the remote, poetic slow movement with endless wheeling celesta and glockenspiel arpeggios, rather like the Holst of ‘Neptune’. At its end is a powerful ode for baritone and orchestra to the eponymous city and its treasured memory. Marc Rossi’s Moon-Mirror is also a very impressive tone poem , with his teacher (McKinley) clearly lighting the way. Anyone looking for a most satisfying and sophisticated late romantic idiom should investigate McKinley: his brilliant technical prowess, deep understanding and empathy with the great classical traditions and his eloquent sense of contemporary language deserve him a prominent place in American music. Bret Johnson
In the October 2003 issue of Tempo we challenged readers to stick their necks out to the extent of each naming a single work composed in the past quarter-century which he or she felt to deserve the accolade of ‘masterpiece’. The closing date for nominations was 1 June 2004 and the results were to be printed in the current issue, October 2004. Regrettably, severe pressure of space has caused us to hold over the publication and
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analysis of the results until the following issue (Volume 59, No.231, January 2005). In the meantime, we can disclose that 22 works by 18 composers were nominated; no work received more than one vote; 16 composers had one work nominated, one had two works, and one had no less than four. Speculation as to this individual’s identity may help to pass the time until the results are printed in full.
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