Current Reviews

        by Jon Yungkans

 
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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

Eat your grief before it eats you.
-- Poet Robert Bly

Personal loss changes hardcore serialist into born-again melodist. Regardless whether this is actually true for American composer George Rochberg – the liner notes claim it is not, but Rochberg’s 20-year-old son died of a brain tumor in 1964 and the composer’s style changed radically after that – grief haunts two of the three works on this discs, with the dead walking palpably alongside the living in alternatingly tonal and atonal guise.

Rochberg’s Fifth Symphony could easily be subtitled “Metamorphosis on a Theme of Gustav Mahler.” It enters Mahler’s psychic realm aggressively – Hercules hurling open the towering iron gates of Hades with a superhuman heave – with the five-note farewell “turn” from the finale of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony snaking its way like a path through the rock-strewn terrain. But while Mahler’s trail leads up the mountain to personal transcendence, Rochberg’s descends through the valley of the shadow of death. Moments of dream-like stillness alternate with nightmares of despair edging us closer to the abyss. We never topple into it but come close enough to see the jagged peaks far below and feel the icy wind lacerate us.

Perhaps because it is ultimately so uncompromising in its message (and perhaps, ironically, made more uncomfortably clear through the overall accessibility of its musical syntax), this symphony had to wait 16 years between its first two performances – its second being this recording. (A third performance was a private concert for the composer and his wife, given by the conductor and orchestra on this disc when they finished this recording ahead of schedule – perhaps the most fitting tribute given a composer since Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic in a similar performance of Ives’ Second Symphony for its composer and his wife, and one that conductor Christopher Lyndon-Gee called “one of the most moving experiences of my life.”)

But what a performance this is! The Saarrbücken Radio Symphony Orchestra attacks this music alternately like demons and angels while Lyndon-Gee guides us like a wise and knowing Virgil ever deeper into this personal underworld. It is hard to imagine Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony (for whom the work was written and who premièred it) performing this symphony with any more brilliance or any more harrowingly than it is here. While the ensemble and solo playing in general are first rate in expressiveness as well as technique, Manuel Fischer-Dieskau’s cello solos are especially melting in their tenderness and palpable heartache.

The end of the Fifth Symphony leaves us staring deep into the chasm of despair. Without warning, the ground beneath our feet collapses and we plunge deep, wide-eyed and headlong, into the frigid Styx of Black Sounds. While the Fifth Symphony featured the brass in all its visionary and phantasmagorial outcries, Black Sounds summons the pitch dark, gripping fury of brass and percussion – appropriate for this adaptation of Rochberg’s Apocalyptica and fully in tune with the malevolent summons from Act III of King Lear that prefaces the score:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world,
Crack Nature’s moulds, all germens split at once,
That make ingrateful man!

A rampant, shattering cataract invoking the Furies and cracking open fully the wellsprings of grief – Lear cursing the heavens as his one loyal daughter dies in his arms – Black Soundsdeposits us on a considerably bleaker shore than the land we have just departed. Where the Fifth Symphony was Romantically charged but stringently argued (Rochberg’s term for this approach was “hard Romanticism”), this work, which the composer wrote while still in his serial phase, is eerie in its other-worldliness and frightening in its stark isolation – the composer trapped in his private, Lear-ful purgatory, with hell not on the path ahead or around the next turn but within mind and soul as he aimlessly wanders the landscape.

Though Rochberg wrote Black Sounds three years before his son’s diagnosis, as an homage to composer Edgard Varèse (with whom he had forged an intimate bond of admiration, though they met in person only once), the sheer violence and anger of the rending of physical bonds between father and son – or in this case father figure and admiring son – comes through in all its pain and devastating clarity, the musical motifs, like memories, stabbing repeatedly. As a jarring precursor of things to come in Rochberg’s life, this piece is terrifyingly effective.

But like Dante, we rise from this relentless Purgatorio to the paradisiacal calm of the Transcendental Variations. Arranged for string orchestra from the slow movement of Rochberg’s Third String Quartet, the music climbs both upward and inward, much in the vein of the Arietta of Beethoven’s last piano sonata, with a combination of gentleness and innocence again in keeping with the master. Again, like Beethoven, Rochberg suspends the progression of time in this music, achieving an eternal breadth and vastness running between the notes as well as through them. It is as though after having gone through the hell and the netherworld of life, Rochberg – and ourselves – have a chance to glimpse and find solace in the divine. As in the other featured works, it is nigh impossible to imagine a reading better than this one.

As both a chronicling of a composer’s intense personal journey and an introduction to what will hopefully be a complete Rochberg cycle, this disc bodes extraordinarily well for the remainder.

 

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