A fascinating concert of 20th century masterworks

40 Years of Contemporary Music: Chamber works by Villa-Lobos, Ginastera, Webern, Terzian, Berio, Boulez, Schreker

Alicia Terzian begins a fascinating program of contemporary chamber music with one of the great works of Brazilian modernism, the Seventh Choros of Heitor Villa-Lobos, written in 1924. The 37-year-old composer spent most of that year in Paris, rubbing shoulders with Ravel, Cocteau, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and others, though he also brought with him his own strongly modernist works he'd written in Brazil. 1924 was a banner year for modernism on both sides of the Atlantic, by the way, with the publication of both Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil and André Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme (though as Desmond Morris notes in his recent Lives of the Surrealists, the tone-deaf Breton wasn't interested in adding musicians to his group). It's refreshing to see Villa-Lobos in this modernist company, rather than the parrots-and-jungle exoticism that usually surrounds him. This is a marvellous version of this work, as well. It's subtitled "Settimino" (which means "Septet"), and it's written for flute, oboe, cello, clarinet, alto saxophone, bassoon, tam-tam and violin. I counted twice, and both times I got 8 instead of 7. I figure the tam-tam isn't counted, like when Ringo plays the tambourine. They're still the Fab Four.



Alberto Ginastera's Pampeana no. 2 for cello & piano comes from 1950, and thus is written in what he called his Subjective Nationalism style, a transition between with folkloric Objective Nationalism of his early years and the avant-garde Neo-Expressionism he worked in after 1958. This is an appealing piece, with Latin rhythms becoming insistently astringent and abstract. It's a fine bridge between the Latin American works and those of the Europeans later in the program.

The 8 Early Songs, a work without opus number by Anton Webern, is the earliest on this program. It's from 1901-04, and shows the strong influence of Wagner, Mahler, Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf. Soprano Marta Blanco and pianist Claudio Espector are effective advocates for these marvellous, slightly naive but always characterful songs. I hadn't heard this music before, and I'm so grateful that it was included on this disc.

Marta Blanco is also featured in the version for voice and five instruments of Luciano Berio's O King, written in response to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968. I recently reviewed a fine recording from Seattle of O King in its extended version for eight voices and orchestra, and it's fascinating to hear a kind of essential distillation of this landmark work, which is all kinds of bleak, but ultimately somewhat hopeful.

Dérive by Pierre Boulez is the same kind of puzzle music that Bach and Mozart delighted in. He shifts and shuffles around a six-note chord among six instruments, and by changing the intervals derives new chords (hence the name). After five derivations, the original chord returns, and then fades into silence. At the highest level of sophistication one can hear and follow along these changes; if not one can puzzle them out while following along with the score. The rest of us might be content with the general idea that there are basic transformations happening, while enjoying the ornate decorations

Alicia Terzian contributes two works to the program. Yagua Ya Yuca for percussion is five minutes of ingenious sounds, alternately wistful and intense. Les Yeux Fertiles for voice and five instruments, is a setting of fragments of poems by Paul Eluard, serious mood pieces all.

Franz Schreker's Der Wind was written in 1909 as a ballet, though it was never performed in his lifetime. It's an occasionally jolly but ultimately sadly nostalgic piece, untroubled by the more experimental modernism of his contemporary Arnold Schoenberg. This work is a fine ending to a fascinating concert of twentieth century masterworks.

Intensity and tranquility in music of genius

Berio: Sinfonia; Boulez: Notations I-IV; Ravel: La Valse

The Seattle Symphony under the direction of Ludovic Morlot perform Berio's Sinfonia, Boulez's Notations I-IV and Ravel's La Valse on this new disc from Seattle Symphony Media.  Though built on a complex maze of literary and musical allusions elaborately folded many times over upon themselves, it's the expressive power and intensity that strikes one about Luciano Berio's Sinfonia. This is especially true of the 2nd movement, O King, which makes reference to the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Sinfonia, written for the 125th Anniversary of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1968, is a work for 8 voices and orchestra, and it was the great Swingle Singers who performed the work at its premiere on October 10, 1968, under the direction of Leonard Bernstein. The raw emotion that is evident in the great Columbia Masterworks recording is perhaps somewhat muted in this new recording, made fifty years later, but I think the superb singing, whispering and murmuring of Roomful of Teeth, Morlot's conception of the work, and the expert playing of the Seattle Symphony musicians maybe result in an even more complex and convincing performance. Then there's the added bonus of the 5th movement, which Berio added to the work in 1969, after the New York recording was already in the can.

In a discussion between John Cage and the late art critic & scholar Irving Sandler, in his fabulous memoir A Sweeper-Up After Artists, Cage expressed a preference for Mark Tobey's White Writing paintings over the works of Jackson Pollock. "We would meet," Cage said, "and he always complained that I didn't like his work enough, and I didn't." Sandler said "But what about the intensity, the excitement?" and Cage replied:

Oh, none of these aspects interested me. They're precisely the things about abstract expressionism which didn't interest me. I wanted to change my way of seeing, not my way of feeling. I'm perfectly happy about my feelings. I want to bring them, if anything, to some kind of tranquility. I don't want to disturb my feelings, and above all, I don't want somebody else to disturb my feelings. I don't spend my life being pushed around by a bunch of artists.

What is fascinating about the programme Ludovic Morlot has chosen on this disc is the balance between intensity and tranquility, which coincidentally was the focus of my recent review of Mariss Jansson's Bruckner 8th Symphony from Munich. This is more than just a contrast between hot Berio and cool Boulez, though that's the obvious line to be drawn here between two vitally important works that in some way exemplify two major thrusts of 20th Century music. There are also ebbs and flows of expression in both of the Sinfonia and Notations. Berio added a fifth movement to make the "narrative substance" of Sinfonia more explicit. It's this story-telling device of adding a coda to bring better balance to the overall story which speaks to these expressive contrasts even within this work.

Ludovic Morlot's own coda, as he tells a story in this programme, is Maurice Ravel's La Valse, a sad and savage reworking of the Viennese waltz, an avatar for the old world forever lost on the other side of the chasm of World War I. After two great works of immense complexity and beauty this is a superb end to a programme that explores and explains the beauty and horror of the 20th Century.

Mark Tobey, White Writing, 1959

Jackson Pollock, White Light, 1954, MOMA, New York

This disc will be released on July 20, 2018.