Two 21st Century Classics

Afterimage: music by Christopher Ceronne, Jacob Cooper, Paganini, Pergolesi

"A story is an operation on duration, an enchantment that affects the flow of time, contracting it or expanding it." In his fourth lecture in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino discusses "Quickness", and finds in literature a motive force that speeds up and/or slows down our perception of time.

"A writer's labor involves keeping track of different times: Mercury's time and Vulcan's time; a message of spontaneity obtained by means of patient, meticulous adjustments; a flash of insight that immediately takes on the finality of that which was inevitable; and also time that flows for no reason other than to allow feelings and thoughts to settle and ripen, unfettered by any impatience, any fleeting contingency."

If literature involves these temporal operations, how much more can music do, entwined as it is with its own built-in passage of time. When Jacob Cooper wrote Stabat Mater Dolorosa (2009), his gloss on Pergolesi's great 18th century choral work, he was thinking in particular of Tachypsychia, the alteration of the perception of time due to various physiological states, most notably life-threatening events, when time can seem to stand still. Cooper stretches out Pergolesi's beautiful phrases, exaggerating the already meditative music until it sounds almost like a kind of hallucinatory chanting. I'm sure that Cooper was aware of the legend that Pergolesi wrote the Stabat Mater on his own deathbed, and that none other than Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his own remix of the Pergolesi original: his parody cantata Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden. So the composer is doubling down, and in doing so has created a classic work for the 21st century. This performance of Cooper's work, along with the first movement of the Pergolesi original, is so impressive. The String Orchestra of Brooklyn, under the sensitive direction of Conductor Eli Spindel, are completely solid in Cooper's long, long phrases, but properly stylish in the Pergolesi. The two vocal soloists, soprano Mellissa Hughes and mezzo-soprano Kate Maroney, likewise navigate with aplomb these stylistic changes, from Pergolesi's idiosyncratic mixture of the operatic and the sacred, to the other-worldly swoops of Cooper.




Another pair of works make up the rest of the album: Christopher Cerrone's High Windows (2013), along with one of its sources, Nicolo Paganini's Caprice no. 6 in G minor, "The Trill". High Windows is another classic work, which besides its trilling violin reference includes a reference to an earlier Cerrone piece, Hoyt–Schermerhorn. This is no simple pastiche, though, but a work of complex allusions organized in what might seem from a contemporary music perspective to be a surprising way, as a 17th century Sonata. Like a work with which it shares a beautiful aural texture, Edward Elgar's Introduction & Allegro, Cerrone's piece is written for string orchestra and string quartet, and is beautifully played here by the Argus Quartet and the SOB. The title of the work refers to a Philip Larkin poem of the same name, which, like the music, is about dreams and ultimate transcendence. What a challenging, and satisfying project from the String Orchestra of Brooklyn!