Mahler: Symphony No. 5;
Kindertotenlieder. Brigitte Fassbaender, mezzo-soprano; NDR
Sinfonieorchester conducted by Klaus Tennstedt. Profil. $33.99 (2 CDs).
Sidney Corbett: Yaël
for Violin and Orchestra; Christopher Adler: Violin Concerto. Sarah Plum,
violin; Chamber Music Midwest Festival Orchestra conducted by Akira Mori
(Corbett); San Diego New Music conducted by Nicholas Deyoe (Adler). Blue
Griffin Recordings. $15.99.
Soundings: Improvisations and
Composition for Horn and Electronica by James Naigus, John Manning, Jason
Palamara, and Israel Neuman. Jeffrey Agrell, horn. MSR Classics. $12.95.
Most music is, by
definition, personal, being written in response to a particular set of
circumstances at a particular time in a composer’s life. Even occasional music,
written for a specific purpose, has ties to the composer’s individuality,
albeit sometimes tenuous ones. But some music requires listeners to understand just why the composer created it, and that
can be a barrier to a work’s acceptance: insisting that listeners comprehend
what a work is “about” is tantamount to saying that the music does not speak
for itself – it speaks for, or regarding, something extramusical, and those not
familiar with and concerned by the non-musical topic are doomed to find the
music of indifferent quality at best. Great music transcends the personal
circumstances in which it was written; lesser works – including, unfortunately,
a great many contemporary compositions – are intimately bound up with those
circumstances and therefore, by definition, limited in their appeal. Thus,
Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Kindertotenlieder
have very strong associations with Mahler’s personal situation at the time they
were written in the first years of the 20th century. Indeed, the
famous Adagietto of the Fifth is
generally acknowledged as a love song to Mahler’s wife, Alma, and Alma is known
to have been angered by Kindertotenlieder
and to have deemed it a foreshadowing of the death of the couple’s older
daughter in 1907. But these personal circumstances are wholly irrelevant to
listeners’ involvement in the music: someone who does not know Mahler at all
might guess, for example, that there was a personal spur to the composer in
writing Kindertotenlieder, whose
approach to the death of children is fatalistic and rather oddly accepting, at
least to a modern listener in countries where the death of young children is
comparatively rare. Factually, this is incorrect: Mahler did not write these
songs in response to personal circumstances.
But the texts from Friedrich Rückert
(1788-1866) certainly resonated deeply with him, or he would not have set them.
They resonate with listeners, too, especially when sung with the clarity and
barely restrained emotion that Brigitte Fassbaender brings to them in a new
Profil release of a performance from 1980. Fassbaender’s mezzo-soprano is a
strong and well-controlled one, and her performance makes it sound as if there
are deep upwelling emotions in her that are barely kept in check by the
necessity to stay in control long enough to hit the right notes. The underlying
tension of the singing, which is very ably backed up by and intertwined with
the playing of the NDR Sinfonieorchester under Klaus Tennstedt, makes for a
highly involving version of these deeply affecting songs. Tennstedt’s reading
of the Fifth Symphony, which also dates to 1980, is very attractive as well.
Tennstedt was never afraid to take Mahler at slow tempos, and that is
particularly apparent in the first movement here, which is decidedly funereal
but retains its underlying forward pulse; and in the third movement, which
Mahler worried would be played too quickly and would therefore lose its
structural centrality. In this performance, the symphony does indeed revolve
around the Scherzo, which was the first movement Mahler completed. The work as
a whole hangs together unusually well in Tennstedt’s reading, which is very
well played and is particularly strong in bringing forth the emotional depths
through which the work climbs to its final positive assertiveness. What
listeners will pick up clearly here is that, whatever the specific reasons
Mahler had for writing the symphony, the work reaches out well beyond them and
communicates directly and effectively even with people who have no knowledge of
the specific circumstances under which it was created.
Not so when it comes to the
contemporary violin concertos by Sidney Corbett and Christopher Adler,
performed by Sarah Plum on a new disc from Blue Griffin Recordings. Here it is
absolutely necessary to know the genesis and intentions of the works in order
to understand what is going on and have a framework within which to react to
them – a self-limiting if scarcely unusual circumstance that results in a (+++)
rating for this very well-played CD. Sidney Corbett’s Yaël is based on the writings of Edmond Jabès (1912-1991), an Egyptian-born
Jewish writer who lived in France from the 1950s until his death and is
considered an important poet with mystical leanings and a profound sense of
melancholy deepened by the Holocaust. The work’s title comes from Jabès’ The Book of Questions and is the name of a woman who personifies
one of Jabès’ major themes,
words, while her unborn anagrammatic child, Elya, personifies silence. The
philosophy is heavy in the literary material, and its translation to music,
although it can be by no means literal, is strongly reflective of the
inward-looking world of Jabès’
work – notably in the very extended violin solos in the first movement, breath, and the fourth and last, archipelago. The middle movements, the dark and shira yaël, offer greater interplay
between soloist and orchestra, but the fact remains that without understanding
the basis of this 2005 work by Corbett (born 1960), it is hard to make sense of
the music as music rather than as a sequence of sounds that, in and of
themselves, go nowhere in particular. The 2013 Violin Concerto by Christopher Adler (born 1972), commissioned by
Plum, offers more-interesting interplay between solo instrument and ensemble;
but here, too, the work serves very distinct and specific purposes without
whose knowledge a listener is left floundering. Designed as a homage to Russian
futurism and the avant-garde of the early 20th century – in other
words, Mahler’s time – Adler’s work starts with Shift (The Knife Grinder), inspired by a painting by Kazimir
Malevich; continues with Vèrelloe,
an invented word from a poem by Konstantin Bolshakov; and concludes with Tektonika, whose title refers to one of
the three disciplines that Alexei Gan said represented a unification of
aesthetics and Marxist politics. As in Corbett’s work, this is heady material
with strong philosophical leanings, and without an understanding of its
generative impulses, it dissolves into reasonably well-made but ultimately
unconvincing sound. Many composers from the 20th century on have, of
course, argued that sound is as valid a concert element as what is traditionally
called music, and indeed that sound in fact is
music – Varèse, Cage and many
others rattled what they perceived as the prison bars of the traditional
separation between music and non-music. Again, there is considerable philosophy
at work, or at play, here. But the ultimate question is whether these works by
Corbett and Adler mean what the composers want them to mean. The answer is no:
music does not mean anything (as
Leonard Bernstein famously said). These works reflect philosophical concerns and an attitude toward underlying
reality that is important to these particular composers and will be congenial
to at least some people who hear the pieces after being properly versed in
their reasons for being. But these are not works that one goes into a concert
hall or to one’s own sound system to hear without prior study and edification.
It is fine for composers to insist on the importance of their personal
rationales for creating particular works in particular ways – and it is equally
fine for listeners to say “no, thank you” when invited to study, understand and
absorb the material that led composers to create particular pieces as a
prerequisite to being able to find those pieces meaningful.
There is much less of an
attempt to communicate deep meaning in the compositions for horn and various
other instruments and media on a new (+++) MSR Classics release. The main
purpose of the works by James Naigus (born 1987), John Manning, (born 1965),
Jason Palamara (born 1977), and Israel Neuman (born 1966) seems to be simply to
explore ways in which the full, rich and warm sound of the horn can be matched
with other sounds in ways that sometimes complement the horn’s inherent
characteristics but more often go against them by trying to make the horn into
something it is not. Jeffrey Agrell is clearly game for all of this: he plays
everything with care, enthusiasm and whatever level of intensity each
construction seems to call for. But it is something of a shame to hear such a
fine horn player reduced – clearly by intent – to an accompanist of mixed media
(Naigus’ Soundings and Improv Sonata, Manning’s Dark, Neuman’s Turnarounds) or a participant with so-called “interactive
electronics” in Palamara’s Ragnorok, Baby.
The oddity of the non-instrumental sounds in all these works – non-instrumental
unless listeners have already accepted the notion that all sound is a form of
music – repeatedly obscures the sound of the horn, which becomes a kind of
audio also-ran even when it takes the lead. Naigus, Manning and Neuman are
credited on the CD as mixed-media performers, and Palamara as being in charge
of interactive electronics, so the composers clearly know what effects they
want and where they want the horn to be placed within them. Its place seems
primarily to be as just one sound generator among many – a valid approach
intellectually but a disappointing one sonically, with the horn’s tremendous
emotional capabilities and extraordinary beauty of sound relegated to
comparative unimportance in order to give the electronics their
front-and-center position. The improvisational works here that involve a
greater degree of non-electronic collaboration with the horn are of somewhat
higher interest. Two by Manning rather uneasily mix the horn, which is an
inherently legato instrument, with
percussive ones: Kyma Divertimento
for horn, percussion and kyma, with Rich O’Donnell on percussion and kyma,
which is an elaborate workstation that “designs” sound; and Conversation II for horn and mandala
drums (played by Aaron Wells). This Manning work actually contrasts
interestingly with Conversations I
for the same combination of horn and mandala drums by Naigus: mandala drums are
electric instruments with special pads and expanded sound capability, retaining
the “struck” notion underlying all drums but expanding it in a variety of ways.
What is probably the least “electronic” work here is in many ways the most
successful: Naigus’ Night Suite,
improvisations for horn and percussion in which Jim Dreier and Nathan Yoder
handle the percussion elements skillfully. In a sense, saying that these are
works for “horn and electronica” gets things backwards: the pieces are
primarily for electronic sounds, generated in a variety of ways, with the horn
usually something of a hanger-on. These works not only avoid the
sometimes-misguided attempts of contemporary compositions to convey deep
meaning through sound, but also seem largely unconcerned with meaning of any
sort: they are comparatively pure sonic explorations, as interesting – or
uninteresting – as self-generated electronic music created by computer
programmers.
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