Current Reviews

        by Benjamin Chee

 
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Sergei Prokofiev
Piano Concerto No. 1-3

Martha Argerich, piano
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor



Samuel Barber
Orchestral Works and Concertos
Leonard Slatkin, Charles Munch



Rimsky-Korsakov
Evgeny Svetlanov


Beethoven
Symphony No.9
Piano Transcription by Franz Liszt
Konstantin Scherbakov, Piano



Kronos Caravan

Naxos continue their traversal of contemporary American compositions with another offering from the oeuvre of Philip Glass, with the not-unexpected coupling of his Second and Third Symphonies. Both have been recorded and released by longtime Glass advocate Dennis Russell Davies with Vienna and Stuttgart orchestras on the Warner-Nonesuch label (Symphony No.2 7559-79496-2; Symphony No.3 7559-79581-2) with various other couplings, but this is the first time these works have appeared together, and on a budget label.

The symphonies here are presented in reverse order, with the shorter Third Symphony (almost by half) presented first, although it has four movements to the Second Symphony's three and is scored for a chamber orchestra of just nineteen string players. By his own admission, much of his early artistic impetus revolved around subtracting elements from music to create his own unmistakable idiom, just as in recent years he has been starting to look for things to put back in.

The Third Symphony, which was written in 1994, is very unlike the Glass most audiences would know from his previous works (which some commentators have described, rather unfairly, as being similar and repetitious to a fault). His capacity to surprise comes in the main course in the second and third movements, the first movement being a kind of short, slow-burning preface of sorts and the last which recaps a bit of everything else which has just transpired.

Marin Alsop has been a strong exponent of American contemporary works since her days at Yale, Juilliard and Tanglewood (where Bernstein and Ozawa were her teachers), and it shows here as she plumbs the low fathoms of this music with the Bournemouth. (Glass, too, had been a Juilliard alumni, and in fact returns to his early experimental polytonic roots in these symphonies.) Her rendition of the second movement is largely comprised of frantic-sounding compound meters, with the players grouped and playing like small trios and quartets in a convoluted tapestry of textures kicking out in all directions.

It is telling about Glass's orchestral writing that he manages to make a smallish group of strings-only players sound profoundly more complex and voluminous than they really are. (Ironically, this idea also lies at the heart of the reductionism found in one branch of the period music movement, where baroque and classical works are played with minimal instruments, or even one, to a part, so as to achieve maximum textual clarity. John Adams and Michael Nyman are equally adroit with such part-writing, and no coincidence either that they have been called "minimalists".)

Simple and Complex Part of the paradox about Glass's music is that you can find commentators and reviewers describing his music as both thematically "simple" and "complex", and what's more, they'd both be right. Which goes to show it really depends on what you're listening out for in his deeply-textured tapestry of complex beats and polytonal sounds, and how deeply into that one is able to plumb. The truth is, the ostinato arpeggios and Alberti bass-lines one hears in Glass is no different, note for note, from what you'd find in a Haydn symphony or Mozart concerto, only that in Glass, they aren't used to support melody but allowed to speak for themselves. Granted, it's not an easy diet for audiences used to pre-digested servings of simple melodies, chords and clearly lineated rhythms - but a bit of rough fibre never killed anyone, either. (And to think, there's just no explanation for the popularity of Ravel's Bolero.)

The third is a chaconne of repeated harmonic sequences over which various instruments, including a prominently contoured solo violin, dictate sinuously long-breathed melodic phrases which are layered, one on top of the others. Alsop does not lead them towards an overblown, Bolero-esque finale but opts for a coolly calculated dissolution of the polytonal string textures, which makes perfect sense given that she restarts the final section almost immediately with a pulsing rhythm that drives the music to its indefatigable conclusion.

The Second Symphony, which was completed only the year before the Third, is a more recognizable flavour of Glass's OCD-tinged minimalism, almost like sui generis Glass writ large for full orchestral forces. Each of the movements lasts over thirteen minutes, with the usual permutations through various repetitive rhythms and harmonies, and like before, Alsop's inclination is to allow the music to verbalize for itself, rather than to overindulge in either extremity of whipping it too hard or slacking too much, and she makes it all sound easier than it really is to hold these thorny textures together.

Much of Glass's music has been written either for collaboration in cross-media, in which sometimes the music hardly makes much sense outside its context (like 1000 Airplanes On The Roof, The Photographer or even Einstein on the Beach), or it has been written for his own performance, whether on solo piano or for his self-titled ensemble. It's surprising that only recently (in the last ten years or so) that some of his concert hall-oriented works are getting more play by other musicians than himself and his own PGE, and when others do get the opportunity to rethink Glass in their own fashion, the results are sometimes nothing short of revelatory.

Here, for instance. Compared with the extant performances of these two symphonies on Nonesuch, where Davies conducts (under the imprimatur of the composer himself, no less) with a more visceral quality in sculpting the ebb and flow of the arppegiated rhythms and harmonies, Alsop brings more refinement and fluidity, helped by a generous spacious ambience that, I'm sure, polishes some of the coarseness off the sound.

On the other hand, more than just a cheaply-priced alternative, Alsop brings a different approach to the table, one which is subtler and persuasive in touch and pacing, but no less revelatory in terms of bring out musical character. Both conductors manage to highlight the detail and clarity impeccably from their respective orchestras, so technically there's little to choose between them. However, listeners who already own (and have enjoyed) Davies might find Alsop's stylish reading instructive, even if - I'm guessing - she hasn't intentionally set out to be didactic.

 
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