SCHOENBERG: Pierrot Lunaire.1 DALLAPICCOLA: Concerto per la notte di Natale 1956.2 Parole di San Paolo3 / 1Maureen McNalley, mez; Sue Ann Kahn, pic/fl; Anand Devandra, cl/bs-cl; Eric Rosenblith, vln/vla; Chris Finckel, cel; Dwight Peltzer, pno. 2Valerie Lamoree, mezzo; 3Benita Valente, sop; Orchestra of Our Time; Joel Thome, cond / Vox NX-2467. Bonus track: CRUMB: Night Music I / Jan de Gaetani, mez; Orchestra of Our Time, Thome / available for free streaming on YouTube
I ran across this gem of an album, originally released on LP in the late 1960s and previously released in 1995 as part of a 2-CD set with works by Pierre Boulez, George Crumb (the item listed above) and others, by accident on the Naxos Music Library. It’s one of a bunch of older recordings that Vox has been making available on CD over the past several months, and this one might easily have escaped your attention, as it did mine.
One reason is that the conductor on this album, Jim Thome (born in 1937 and still with us) and his Orchestra of Our Time simply don’t have as high a profile in the classical music world for performing contemporary music as the Louisville Orchestra or the late Robert Craft. Checking him up online, I discovered that his biggest claim to fame was that he did a full concert of music by the late Frank Zappa, an ambitious, musically well-intentioned but limited talent who thought (as his devoted followers thought and still think) that he was a musical genius. He was very clever, but not nearly as creative as he thought he was, but Thome rode that horse to a brief moment of stardom and it sort of branded him, unfortunately, as a niche performer.
Yet this album attests to Thome’s excellent skills as a conductor of modern music. Of the companion disc not included here, the one item that grabbed me was George Crumb’s Night Music I, a piece that, somehow, I had failed to get in my collection, so I tacked on the YouTube link for your edification. The other three items are also available on YouTube, but of course you must be prepared to watch three-to-four-minute ads ranging from cell phones or fried chicken to rather disgusting promos for products that cure toe fungus, constipation, incessant flatulence or head lice (happily, not all in the same ad).
This version of Pierrot Lunaire is accurately sung and played, to be sure, but is stiff and metronomic in rhythm; you can actually count the beats as they go past your ear. Of course, this could be the way Thome conceived it, wanting the listener to have at least the rhythm to hang onto as an aural signpost when listening to it, but it is unusual. Not even Schoenberg’s own 1940 recording of the piece for Columbia, which suffers from dry, claustrophobic mono sound, has as resolutely steady a rhythm as this—not to mention the performances by Bethany Beardslee (with Craft) and Patricia Kopatchinskaya. Yet part of this is also due to the delivery by mezzo-soprano Maureen McNalley, who sounds more weary and blasé than she does crazy in a fun sort of way. Yet the performance loosens up a bit by the midway point, where the playing of the ensemble is particularly excellent.
For a Christmas piece, the Concerto is pretty much atonal and quite busy, but again the rhythm is quite regular although Valerie Lamoree’s voice us under better control and more fluid in delivering the sung lines. But this is surely one of the strangest pieces of “Christmas” music I’ve ever heard, completely atonal, and after the soft,delicate opening, the notes bounce around like Mexican jumping beans in a container. Valerie Lamoree, however, is a livelier singer than McNalley, and here Thome conducts with greater energy than in the Schoenberg piece. I’ve been unable to locate any other commercial recording, and since this one had no liner notes online, I can’t tell you the exact text being sung, but the diction is very clear. , so if you understand Italian you should have no problem.
Parole di San Paolo is sung by Benita Valente, a vastly overrated soprano of my youth who had very little voice and what she did have was dry-sounding and fluttery, but she was a first-class musician so that instrumentalists and conductors adored her. She’s at least competent here, and the music is again resolutely atonal. Without a score, the naked ear cannot really explain all that is going on, but I did find this information on the Cambridge University Press website. an excerpt from The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola by Brian Alegant:
It models the twelve-tone techniques and strategies, the small-scale and large-scale form, and the pitchclass and set-class associations on the surface. Particular emphasis is placed on showing how changes in partitioning strategies articulate changes in the form.
Parole is written for medium voice and an instrumental ensemble that includes two pairs of woodwinds (flute/alto flute, and clarinet/bass clarinet), pitched percussion (celesta, piano, harp, vibraphone), and viola and cello. On the whole, its soundscape is more Webernian than Schoenbergian, and recalls the linear orientation and polyphonic textures of such first- and second-phase compositions as the Quattro liriche di Antonio Machado, Goethe-Lieder, and An Mathilde. A few passages look forward to the sound ideal of Sicut Umbra, the first work completed after Ulisse. One of its most striking attributes is a mutable approach to text setting: virtually every line of the text evokes a change in dynamics, texture, rhythmic profile, and partitioning strategy. As a result, the surface changes frequently, and cantabile passages with soft dynamics and thin textures are juxtaposed with furioso passages with loud dynamics and thick textures.
Parole di San Paolo models the twelve-tone techniques and strategies, the small-scale and large-scale form, and the pitchclass and set-class associations on the surface. Particular emphasis is placed on showing how changes in partitioning strategies articulate changes in the form.
From a technical standpoint, Parole draws its techniques from all four serial phases. First-phase features include the use of cross partitions, periodic structuring, and a transparent orchestration and ethereal atmosphere. Second-phase features include floating rhythm (schwebender Rhythmus), a prohibition against octave doublings, and the (Webernian) procedures of trichordal derivation and axial symmetry (with both even and odd index numbers). Features common to third- and fourth-phase works are a fluid approach to row handling and aggregate formation, some rhythmicized Klangfarbenmelodie, a prevalence of ultra-soft dynamics, and, especially, the Schoenbergian ideal of associating segmental and nonsegmental harmonies. (These procedures are explained in due course.) By the same token, Parole spurns many procedures that are found in the surrounding compositions (namely, Preghiere, Three Questions with Two Answers, and Ulisse), avoiding hexachordal inversional combinatoriality, leitrhythms, un-pitched percussion, and thick sound masses.
If you can make sense of that, more power to you. For me, any music that needs this much information to be understood is emotionally stunted to begin with. If all you’re listening to or for is the technique used to construct a piece, it’s just a mathematical exercise and not music, but fortunately Dallapiccola’s music does evoke strange and exotic feelings in the listener, thus you can pretty much ignore the “hexachordal inversional conbinatoriality” and just enjoy it for what it is.
Happily, George Crumb’s music always communicated with his listeners provided that they at least come halfway to him, and this wonderful piece, though again conducted a bit on the rhythmically strict side, receives a wonderful reading from the late, great Jan de Gaetani. She had a medium-sized voice, larger than that of Cathy Berberian but smaller than most operatic mezzos, that carried wonderfully in the hall due to its bright, perfect focus, although in Night Music I she is most often called upon to speak the words in pitch as in Pierrot Lunaire rather than to sing out. Yet she was such a great communicative artist, very much on a part with Berberian, that once she broke through to fame within the classical community she never looked back until her untimely death: like Berberian and Tatiana Troyanos, she died in her early 50s, a great loss to the classical world.
Crumb’s score for this piece, like so many of his works of that time, is based on the clever and colorful use of percussion to create a strange and exotic sound-world around the singer. It was a gift of his to be able to continually vary these sounds so that, although everything he wrote was stamped with his personal style, no two pieces really sounded exactly alike. There are several moments in Night Music I, for instance, where Crumb gives the singer sustained notes to sing; she is not expected to chatter away with the complex rhythms as in Ancient Voices of Children, the work (and recording) that shot de Gaetani to fame in the early 1970s.
My assessment of Thome,. then, is of a meticulous musician who undoubtedly spent many hours rehearsing difficult modern music until he reached a point where its performance had a structural unity about it, and for that I thank him, although I don’t think that his performances have the sweep or inner excitement of Craft’s. Nonetheless, considering the rarity of these works (Pierrot Lunaire excepted), I highly recommend this recording for your collection. The sound quality is excellent throughout, and to the above I might also recommend Pierre Boulez’s Éclat, another modern percussion piece whose delicacy of texture and ingenious structure fully matches the scores of Dallapiccola and Crumb.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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