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WALKER: Address for Orchestra. CRUMB: A Haunted Landscape. REVUELTAS: La Coronela / Basque National Orch.; Robert Treviño, cond / Ondine 1445-2
This disc is the sequel to conductor Robert Treviño’s 2021 Americanscapes, which I somehow missed for review. Like this one, it presented the music of composers oft-ignored by others: Charles Loeffler, Carl Ruggles, Howard Hanson and Henry Cowell, of whom Loeffler is clearly the oddest—I’ve not heard anything by him other than his Memories of My Childhood, and that in an ancient broadcast by Arturo Toscanini. The nominal title of this album is American Opus, but Americascapes 2 is also listed in small print above it on the cover.
Investigating some of his previous recordings, I ran across an album of little-known works for violin and orchestra by Einojuani Rautavaara as well as, believe it or not, a full set of the Beethoven Symphonies. I’m listening to the first symphony right now, and he certainly makes the music sound jaunty—and fun, something one rarely gets out of this symphony. Treviño has worked with some of the best orchestras in the world: Radio France, the RPO, LSO and LPO, the Tonhalle Orchestra, Helsinki, Baltimore, Cleveland, San Francisco, Toronto, s well as some outliers such as the Mahler Festival Leipzig, and both the China and St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestras. This year he is also making his debuts with both the Minnesota and Yomiuri (Tokyo) Orchestras, so he has clearly gotten around.
Despite his living to age 96, George Walker is just barely known in the classical world because, as a black composer, he didn’t write music that was either easily accessible or based on spirituals or work songs like to many others. His 1959 Address for Orchestra, written as a memorial to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, is no exception. The music is typical of Walker in his use of astringent harmonies, but here, in 1959, the tonal language is not as abrasive as in his later works. Indeed, there are quirky but “followable” themes which he balances brilliantly, moving the various strands of the orchestra around in the style of Copland—possibly on purpose in order to be recognized as a somewhat mainstream modern American composer. Yet although there are traces of Copland in this piece, Walker is very much his own man, emphasizing strong ostinato rhythms in the first movement and emphasizing the brighter instruments, particularly the trumpets and trombones along with the violins. There are also nice spot solos for clarinet, oboe and flute; the movement ends in a sea of percussion. The soft, rather sad second movement opens with an English horn solo and, in fact, concentrates on the winds with muted trumpet figures in the background. This, in turn, leads into an equally slow third movement which opens with the cellos playing in unison but again moves into delicate wind figures. In fact, this haunting third movement is so delicately scored in this opening section that one would think it were being played by a chamber orchestra, but this changes with the arrival of the massed strings. Here, the tempo increases gradually, the brass returns, and the music becomes more complex, the violins playing double-time figures against the basses, although the latter eventually double up the time as well. This is a masterful score, carefully balanced and quite varied in its use of different rhythms.
This is followed by another unusual piece, George Crumb’s A Haunted Landscape. Written in 1984 for the New York Philharmonic, it is unique among Crumb’s output in that it calls for no less than 20 percussion instruments. As usual with Crumb, his textures are spread out, giving the music an unusual sound and employing unorthodox timbral blends, and the piece is as much if not more of a “mood” piece than a musical structure. Crumb seldom wrote “outwardly”; most of the time he sucked you into his unique musical world, which made the listening experience more intimate. You had two choices: to sit back, absorb what he gave you and just try to process it as it went by your mind, or try to find traditional thematic “sound posts” and fail miserably. His was the music of a dream world, often a bad or at least a disturbing dream—a sort of musical spider’s web. Held notes become subliminal drones; every little gesture by a wind or reed instrument becomes a major event; and the whole captures you in a way that cuts you off from reality.
The first time I ever heard the music of Silvestre Revueltas was in Enrique Bátiz’ box set, Musica Mexicana, many years ago, and I was blown away. This man had such a fertile musical imagination, and incorporated so many modern techniques into his mostly Mexican-oriented themes that he, too, seemed to create his own unique sound world. I already had a recording of this ballet, La Coronela (The Lady Colonel), conducted by Gisela Ben-Dor on Naxos, and it’s a very good performance. This one is, too. What a shame that he threw his great talent away on the altar of alcohol! He was already considered a top Mexican composer at the time of his death, but removing himself from the scene just as he hit his peak only damaged his reputation. In the opening section of this ballet, I noted allusions to Paul Dukas as well as to Stravinsky and an underlying ironic sense of humor. (There exists a film clip of Revueltas from a Mexican movie, c. 1939, in which he is playing piano in a seedy-looking cantina; over the piano is a sign which says, in Spanish, “Please don’t shoot the piano player.”) There is, simply, so much going on in Revueltas’ music that you’re not sure if he spent long hours trying to find just the right path to development or if it came to him in white-hot inspirational flashes. I’m guessing the latter since he spent so much time either getting drunk or fighting a hangover.
In some ways, this score sounds particularly aggressive for a ballet and, like Stravinsky, Revueltas constantly shifted rhythms from under the feet of the dancers, but by the time it was written (he hadn’t quite finished it at the time of his death in 1940) this style of ballet music had become rather more common. And bear in mind, Revueltas died in poverty.
Thus this album is, you might say, a tribute to three very different composers of the “Americas,” each of whom had a distinctive “voice” yet only one of which (Crumb) was part of the classical music mainstream of his time—and in Crumb’s case, it was primarily at festivals of modern music. Walker eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his pieces (Lilacs) but never really broke into the repertoire and Revueltas was just too sad a story to contemplate. Yet each in his own way represented the qualities of individualism that both Mexico and the United States pride themselves on, and there is no question that Treviño is a hell of a conductor. Recommended.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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