Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring;
Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra. Park Avenue Chamber Symphony
conducted by David Bernard. Recursive Classics. $20.99.
Samuel Adler: Symphony No. 6;
Concerto for Cello and Orchestra; Drifting on Winds and Currents.
Maximilian Hornung, cello; Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by José Serebrier. Linn Records. $20.
Keys to the City: The Great New
York Pianists Perform the Great New York Songs. Roven. $19.99.
Ben Johnston: String Quartets Nos.
1, 5 and 10. Kepler Quartet (Sharan Leventhal and Eric Segnitz, violins;
Brek Renzelman, viola; Karl Lavine, cello). New World Records. $15.99.
Ben Johnston: String Quartets
Nos. 6, 7 and 8; Quietness. Kepler Quartet (Sharan Leventhal and Eric
Segnitz, violins; Brek Renzelman, viola; Karl Lavine, cello). New World
Records. $15.99.
The definition of
“contemporary” changes over time – by definition. But the notion of “modern” is
a bit different. In Western music, it
has to do with the sound of a piece – not the specifics of its structure or its
compositional method so much as the way the composer approaches the music and
the way listeners perceive it. “Contemporary” is an objective adjective,
“modern” a much more subjective one. This is why Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring still seems so
modern, a century after it was composed. There is something in the strangeness
of the orchestration, the irregularity of the rhythms, the pounding ostinato of some sections and the
instrumental screeching of others, the willingness to entice the ear for a
moment and then attack it with noise the next, the frequent alterations of
dynamics, the unpredictability of tempo changes, that makes this work feel
unfailingly “modern” no matter how often it is played. A tour de force for conductors and orchestras, The Rite of Spring is also a work that inexorably pulls audiences
along even though very few people have seen it as a ballet. The best
performances are cognizant of the remarkable modernity of the score and go out
of their way to accentuate it – and the Recursive Classics release featuring
the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony under David Bernard is an exceptional one.
Using a newly edited and revised version of The
Right of Spring to which Bernard himself contributed, this performance
brings extraordinary clarity, instrumental balance and an unending series of
elegant touches to what is still a very complex score. Percussion emphases are
pointed and intense, timpani penetrate the ensemble with clarity, woodwinds
vary in sound from lyrical to screechy, strings run the gamut from fleet to
oppressively heavy – every section of the orchestra is highly soloistic as well
as incorporated into an overall sound world that is every bit as evocative as
Stravinsky intended it to be. The revisions in this new edition are technical
ones that will largely be inaudible to casual listeners, but anyone hearing
this outstanding performance will be captivated by the enormous skill of the
musicians and by Bernard’s near-perfect handling of pacing, sectional contrast
and overall sound. The pairing of The
Rite of Spring with Bartók’s
Concerto for Orchestra is a particularly
happy one in this case, since Bernard treats Stravinsky’s work itself as a
concerto for orchestra – which, listeners to this recording will realize, it
is. Bernard brings the same clarity of purpose and intensity of execution to
the Bartók as to the
Stravinsky. The seriousness of the opening movement emerges from the first quietly
emerging notes and remains throughout, making the contrast with the second, Giuoco delle coppie (“Game of Couples” –
for some reason, the CD gives the translation but not the original title), all
the more apparent. The multiple duets are given with a lightness and bounce
that make the following Elegia all
the more effective, and Bernard does a first-rate job of showing the
connections between this movement’s themes and those of the first movement.
Then there is genuine hilarity, as well as a clear Lehár parody, in the Intermezzo
interrotto (called “Interrupted intermezzo” on the CD); and the concluding perpetuum mobile, a litmus test of any
orchestra’s ability to play together and stay together for 10 nonstop minutes,
comes across brilliantly – a genuine capstone to a remarkably fine and highly
recommended performance.
The music of Samuel Adler
(born 1928) partakes of both modernity and contemporaneity: the works on a new
Linn Records CD are no more than 30 years old. Interestingly, although these
pieces are in no way beholden to Bartók’s
Concerto for Orchestra, they include,
to some degree, some of the same tension between traditional form and
distinctly modern harmony and orchestration. Adler’s Symphony No. 6 here gets its first performance as well as its first
recording, and it proves to be a substantial, energy-packed three-movement work
with a fine sense of instrumental balance. José Serebrier and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra make sure
the first movement has plenty of headlong motion and excitement, with the
result that the mysterious and rather dark second movement provides very strong
contrast, its interjections of lyricism bringing a brief sense of naïveté to
what is otherwise a sophisticated-sounding piece. The final movement’s mood
resembles that of the first, but here a primary impression – as in The Rite of Spring – is of constant
rhythmic changes that sweep the listener along. The symphony as a whole is
energetic and intense, if not particularly deep from an emotional standpoint;
perhaps this makes it especially reflective of much of contemporary life. It is
coupled here with Adler’s Concerto for
Cello and Orchestra, played with fine tone and musical understanding by
Maximilian Hornung. This four-movement work effectively highlights the tonal
beauty and virtuosic capabilities of the solo instrument, the first movement offering
considerable lyricism while the second has a pleasantly jazzy and perky feel to
it, notably in the use of pizzicato double basses and a drum set. The
meditative, fantasia-like third movement is followed by a final rondo that well
reflects its marking, Fast and playful.
This fascinating CD concludes with a piece poetically titled Drifting on Winds and Currents,
commissioned as an in memoriam work
and offering a mixture of soothing textures with some underlying feelings of
uncertainty and even anxiety. It is a short, effective tone poem whose dramatic
central section only briefly disturbs the comparative calm of the opening and
closing. All the works are played with skill and understanding: Serebrier seems
quite comfortable with Adler’s music, and the orchestra plays very well
throughout.
The modernity of a new Roven
release called Keys to the City is as
much in concept as in music. This is a disc for lovers of fine piano
performances and of classical musicians “letting their hair down” by playing
popular standards and show tunes rather than the “long-hair” pieces that
classical works are sometimes described as being. The disc includes 14 piano
players: Robbie Kondor, Axel Tosca, Dick Hyman, Bette Sussman (co-producer of
the recording), George Whitty, Billy Stritch, Mike Renzi, Frank Owens, Paul
Shaffer, Glen Roven (the CD’s other co-producer), Lee Musiker, John Kander and
Fred Ebb (as duo pianists), and Leon Fleisher. The music is uniformly pleasant
and generally quite well known, all of it focused portrayals of or reactions to
elements of New York City. There is nothing particularly challenging here for
the pianists or for listeners’ ears, and in truth, there is little distinctive
about some of the performers’ stylistic handling of these short pieces. But
there are several high points: Tosca’s Latin-tinged approach to Take the “A” Train; Whitty’s funky and
interestingly updated New York, New York;
Stritch’s unusual instrumental and vocal handling of Gershwin’s There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New
York; and Fleisher’s evocative way with The
Man I Love, offered as a bonus track since it is not overtly New Yorkish. This
is easy-listening music, to be sure, a contemporary (and in some cases
distinctly modern-sounding) version of the salon recitals of the 19th
century, and its overall milieu is that of jazz and nightclubs rather than
recital venues or concert halls. It is, simply, fun, and a chance to hear
numerous skilled pianists tackling some well-known works and, at least in some
cases, putting their personal stamp on the material.
“Fun” is not the word for
the string quartets of Ben Johnston, which are very serious indeed as well as
very contemporary and very modern –
except insofar as they reach all the way back to Bach in a significant way.
Johnston (born 1926) is a fascinating composer who uses the microtonality of
Harry Partch in further-developed and intriguing ways. His quartets are created
through an extremely complex methodology that – unlike the methods used by many
other composers of recent times – is not necessary for listeners to know about
or understand for them to find the music involving and highly effective. This
in itself would make Johnston’s quartets more-frequent concert items were it
not for the fact that they are fiendishly difficult to play, thanks to his
technical innovations and notational system. Johnston’s quartets are
essentially an argument for just
intonation in the same way that Bach’s The
Well-Tempered Clavier was a demonstration of how best to produce music in well temperament rather than meantone temperament. Although modern
listeners often think “well” refers in Bach’s work to “properly” or
“correctly,” it does not: Bach’s music constituted an auditory exploration,
explanation and advocacy of a particular type of tuning system (which, by the
way, is not the same as the equal
temperament generally in use today, which became dominant after Bach’s
time).
Academic discussion of
tuning methods aside, Johnston clearly shows a firm grasp of musical history in
his quartets: he writes fugues and variations as well as serial movements, and
even dips into folksong from time to time. The accretive catholicity of his
style is presented in a system using an exceptionally large number of pitches –
potentially hundreds per octave. Again, though, the enormous complexity of the
system belies the surprising communicative power of the music, which comes
through especially clearly in the Kepler Quartet’s recordings of six of the
quartets. These date from as early as 1959 and as late as 1995, and show
definite progress, or at least variation, in Johnston’s use of compositional
techniques: from a start in fairly straightforward serialism, his music moves
into more and more refined and difficult-to-pin-down methods that produce often
very surprising sonic beauty despite the difficulty of bringing that beauty
forth. Thus, his quartets by and large are the opposite of other ones by recent
composers that may seem to have been written more for performers and fellow
composers and less for audiences. The difficulties inherent in the performance
of Johnston’s quartets bring to mind Joseph Joachim’s initial epigrammatic
reaction to Brahms’ Violin Concerto, to the effect that Brahms had written a
concerto “not for the violin, but against it.” It requires tremendous
skill and dedication, as well as virtuosity, to cut through the performance
complexities of Johnston’s quartets to the consonance and beauty that lie at
their heart and that microtonality and just intonation make possible in ways
that standard equal temperament does not.
The New World Records
releases of these quartets are recorded warmly – in a way that fits the music
quite well – and with plenty of clarity, so details of the performances shine
through. The performances themselves, which Johnston supervised, appear to
deserve to be called definitive for that reason alone. They are also, to put it
plainly, exceptionally well done. Different listeners will find different
elements of the quartets appealing. No. 1, called “Nine Variations,” is the
closest to traditional in tuning and also the most derivative in use of a
pre-existing style, in this case serialism. It is clear in the Webern manner
and also rather hard-edged. The single-movement No. 5 is an extended
transformation of an Appalachian gospel song called “Lonesome Valley,” and here
Johnston’s approach may put listeners in mind of some of the works of Charles
Ives. No. 10 delves into folksong territory as well, in a finale in which the
tune of “Danny Boy” repeatedly appears. On the other Kepler Quartet disc, No.
6, whose creation Johnston says gave him considerable trouble, is a piece that tries
to do multiple things, including merging just intonation with twelve-tone
composition and exploring ways of producing melody without being either
dramatic or programmatic. In this quartet, the techniques do tend to subsume
the music – Johnston used the Fibonacci series as a primary tool – and so the
work feels rather distanced and distancing in its elaborate permutations. Nos.
7 and 8 have not been recorded before, and their prodigious difficulties of
performance, especially in No. 7, are certainly part of the reason. Yet the
fluidity with which the Kepler Quartet handles these works at least makes them
approachable for listeners, if scarcely forthright or easy to absorb and
understand. Actually, the most readily accessible piece here is a brief Rumi
setting called Quietness that stands
as an epilogue or afterword to the quartets: Johnston is himself the vocalist
in this work, whose communicative simplicity belies the extremely complex and
innovative mind that produced this piece as well as the quartet sequence. The
most surprising thing about Johnston’s quartets is not their complexity, not
their adherence to a variety of modern compositional tenets, not the centrality
to them of a tuning system different from the one to which most performers and
listeners are accustomed; rather, it is the way that Johnston overcomes the
challenges he has set for himself in expanding Partch’s microtonality and applying
twelve-tone and other techniques while at the same time not eschewing melody or
even, from time to time, lyricism. The Johnston quartets may be easier to
listen to than they are to perform, but that does not mean they are easy to listen to – by and large, they
are not. But unlike many modern and/or contemporary compositions, these
quartets repay the attention and attentiveness they require of listeners by
producing a set of sounds, and through those sounds a set of feelings,
different from anything to which most listeners will be accustomed. They are
not really an argument for just intonation instead
of equal temperament, any more than Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier was an argument for well temperament instead of meantone temperament. Rather, they are an assertion
that by using just intonation, it is possible to communicate thoughts and
feelings and emotions effectively, in ways that will be new to listeners in
general but recognizable at an almost subliminal level. Just intonation may
never take its place beside equal temperament in terms of its frequency of use,
but Johnston shows how it could be
the foundation of a different set of music-making and music absorption that is
just as valid as the much-more-common tuning almost always now used in Western
musical works. Johnston’s is music filled with possibilities, and the Kepler
Quartet deserves enormous credit for bringing so many of those possibilities to
the fore.
