Richard
Barrett: Opening
of the MouthHenri Pousseur: Guirlande
de PierreMorton Feldman: NeitherRecent CDs
| The following ‘reviews’ are not formal responses to submitted CDs; they are just personal reflections on recent purchases that I have found interesting from various points of view (any CDs received as gifts are marked #). Most of them are recent releases; some of them have been around for a year or two, but may have passed unnoticed. Many are on small labels, but virtually all are obtainable via Internet distributors. There will be additions every few weeks. |
| Richard
Barrett: Opening
of the Mouth |
| Henri Pousseur: Guirlande
de Pierre |
| Morton Feldman: Neither |
 |
Franco
Evangelisti: Collected Works;
Proiezione sonore (1956), Incontri di fasce sonore (1957), Aleatorio
(1959), Spazio a
cinque (1961), Random or not Random (1962), Proporzioni (1959), 4!
(1954), Ordini (1955),
Campi integrati n.2 (1959-79), Die Schachtel (1963); David Tudor
(pno), Aloys Kontarsky
(pno), Wolfgang Marschner (vln), Eberhard Blum (fl), LaSalle Quartet,
Società Cameristica
Italiana et al.; ed. RZ 1011-12 (2 CDs); 52’57",
63"42". |
| Franco
Evangelisti (1926-80) was one of the legends of the post-war European
avant-garde. From
the mid-fifties he immersed himself in hyperstructuralism, but almost
from the start,
there was a partly Cage-derived anarchic counterforce (namely
indeterminacy) which sought
to eat away the cultural edifice from within (Ordini, composed
in 1955, is probably
the first significant European work to incorporate an indeterminate
pitch element). This
force gets ever stronger in subsequent works, and in 1963 Evangelisti
decided to abandon
composition in favour of improvisation, and accordingly founded the
composer/performer
group Nuova Consonanza, whose early members included both
Frederic Rzewski
(keyboards) and the ‘Spaghetti Western’ film composer Ennio
Morricone (trumpet).
Some striking early examples of the group’s work (from 1967
onwards) can be heard on
ed. RZ 1009. Part of the essence of legends is that in some respects, at least, they are impenetrable, unreachable, secretive. Such was long the case with Evangelisti, or at least with his ‘composed’ works. One or two were available on disc, and one had memories or hearing others here and there, in isolation. Scores were easier to obtain, but it wasn’t always easy to assess how they would sound. Now, suddenly, we can hear, if not the whole output, then at least all those pieces which contributed to the myth: Das Unzulängliche, hier wird’s Ereignis. To say that this collection destroys the myth would be too dramatic; rather it relativises it – puts it to one side. Suddenly there’s just a body of work, there to be heard and compared with other works. So how does it measure up (and to what)? Clearly it’s the work of a major talent; but if there’s genius there, as Evangelisti’s advocates are inclined to suggest, then perhaps it’s conceptual (a matter of seizing and problematising the historical moment) rather than compositional. It’s music that seems to me to demonstrate both the triumphs and the limitations of ‘pure intelligence’: a compelling intellectual adventure, but an adventure largely for its own sake (perhaps also an exercise in Mephistophilean negation), rather than one that gets us anywhere. The orchestral Ordini is intriguing, but it scarcely opens up perspectives in the way Stockhausen’s Gruppen does, any more than Spazio a cinque matches Carré. Likewise, the brief electronic piece Incontri di fasce sonore compares very well to average Cologne products of the period, but hardly rivals Stockhausen’s Gesang, or Koenig’s Klangfiguren II. Indeed, the brevity of so many of these pieces ties them to a post-Webernism that was already on the wane, and needed more than an injection of Cageian indeterminacy to keep it alive. Perhaps, by the early sixties, Evangelisti sensed that his work centred on a dialectic that soon wouldn’t exist any more. Although one now has the opportunity to listen to these works one after another – as some kind of cumulative ‘summa’ – I think that doing so does them a disservice. After all, with the exception of the music-theatre piece Die Schachtel, they weren’t designed as components of an integrated ‘Evangelisti Evening’ (even Die Schachtel lasts only 35 minutes), but rather as individual agent provocateurs. Perhaps the best thing would be to listen to just a couple of works here and there, interspersed among pieces by other composers; that way, their distinctive qualities emerge more sharply . |
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# Richard Barrett: Opening of
the Mouth
(1992-97); ELISION Ensemble, with Richard Barrett – electronics;
ABC 465 258-2;
72’16" Two earlier CDs of Barrett’s work – chamber works including negatives on Etcetera KTC 1067 (1993) and the remarkable orchestral piece Vanity on NMC D0415 (1996) – convinced me and many others that he is one of the outstanding talents of his generation; the new CD confirms that impression. Comparing all three, what I find particularly impressive is the way that a very powerful personal aesthetic is conveyed without resort to any obvious stylistic ‘fingerprints’. Naturally, when one looks at Barrett’s scores, one immediately recognises the composer’s very distinctive, exquisite calligraphy, but distinctive handwriting is no guarantee of musical personality. |
| Yet on listening to
Opening of the Mouth,
one is immediately drawn into a very personal world which both
confirms and expands what
one knew from earlier works. It’s not just a matter of the
microtones, the extended
techniques, or even the rhythmic ‘complexity’ (I prefer to
think of it as
meticulously shaped plasticity); any number of other composers use
some or all of these. I
shan’t attempt here to reduce the ‘Barrett experience’
to verbal formulae,
but if I were doing so, I think I’d be inclined to take my
orientation from cinema
rather than other music. I’d be thinking of particular
perspectives, lightings,
camera angles, continuities and discontinuities (cuts, fades, blurs,
superimposed
screens), granularities, and so forth. Barrett’s earlier
scores were notable for,
among other things, their obsessive quotations from Samuel Beckett,
which acted at titles,
mottoes and epilogues, though the composer never set any of
Beckett’s texts as such.
When Beckett died, Barrett decided it was time to break this habit,
and after considering
various options, settled for Paul Celan. This wasn’t just a
matter of substituting
one poet for another. Admittedly the two share a fascination with
death, but in other
respects they are very different. Leaving aside the differences
between German and
English, Celan’s poetic language is as convoluted as
Beckett’s is sparse, and
his outlook as agonised as the Irishman’s is stoic. Part of this arises from the format of the work, which interlocks and overlaps various distinct pieces. As far back as 1990, in the trio another heavenly day, Barrett conceived a piece in terms of separate musics for each instrument – in effect, three simultaneous but related compositions (the opening part of Vanity is a more complex version of the same idea). And many of the various pieces which comprise the subsequent negatives cycle overlap to a limited degree. Opening of the Mouth takes these considerations a great deal farther: at all but a couple of points, there are at least two compositions (for solo instruments or small ensembles) being played simultaneously. Far from producing a sense of disorder, this allows one composition to act as a ‘frame’ for another, so that, for example, the innately frantic gestures of one piece may act as eddies and disturbances within the more spacious context provided by another. Generally speaking, it’s the solo instrumental works (such as abglanzbeladen/auseinandergeschrieben or CHARON) that fall in the former categories, and the Celan-settings for voice(s) and small ensembles, sometimes with live electronics, that create the frames. This is particularly the case in the first half of the work, which is rather like a highly decorated ‘gran adagio’; the second part is more consistently highly-strung. The performances and recording are exceptional. Though the CD cannot convey one essential aspect of the work – it was designed in conjunction with installations by Richard Crow, photographs of which are included in the booklet – I really don’t have any sense that anything is missing. This is an outstanding release. |
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Henri
Pousseur: Guirlande de Pierre (1997);
Marianne Pousseur (sop), Vincent Bouchot (bar), Frederic Rzewski
(pno); Cypres CYP 4603;
71’01". Even coming in the wake of two other releases of comparable recent works by Pousseur – Traverser le forêt (Adda 581295; 1993) and Dichterliebesreigentraum (Cypres CYP 7602; 1997?) – I find this disc rather perplexing. Back in the fifties, Pousseur was the most Webern-orientated member of the Darmstadt avant-garde. Then, in the sixties, as the collage movement got under way, Pousseur developed a ‘harmonic method’ which allowed him to shift systematically from chromatic to diatonic music in a quasi serial way, but he also made considerable use of quotation and pastiche, most notably in the opera Votre Faust. |
| Votre
Faust still has its
intriguing aspects, not the least of which is the extraordinarily
lavish LP album issued
by Harmonia Mundi in the early seventies (in two quite different
versions – German
and French!), which included specially designed playing cards and card
games by Butor and
Pousseur that reflected the aleatory structure of the work itself. Yet
it always seemed to
me that there was something terribly schoolmasterish – almost
bloodless - about the
music, and that impression has grown over the years. Guirlande de Pierre (‘Stone Garland’, but also ‘Garland for Pierre’) is an extended song cycle in three parts for soprano, baritone and piano, and was intended as a homage to Pousseur’s longtime friend and advocate, the composer and conductor Pierre Bartholomée. In fact, by no means all the material is new; much of it draws on major earlier works, including Votre Faust and Petrus HebraÔcus; other pieces arose over the years from student demonstrations, from a family funeral, from a Brecht production… While the style of the music varies greatly from one song to the next, the ‘uniting’ factor is quotation and pastiche. So
what is one to make
of this? Though Pousseur has devised a ‘cyclic structure’
for the songs, I
don’t hear much evidence of cycle or structure. Is it, perhaps,
meant as
‘Pousseur’s Greatest Hits’? Or more plausibly, as
‘An Evening with
Henri Pousseur and Friends’? Though much of the music is innately
pleasant enough,
most of it seems very anonymous, except when it sets out to pastiche
Schumann or Weill,
among others (in which case, the ‘personality’ is theirs,
not Pousseur’s).
Sorry, but for all that I accept Pousseur’s sincerity as an
artist, I just can’t
see or hear what the point of this is, except perhaps as domestic
celebration. |
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Morton Feldman:
Neither (1977); Sarah Leonard (sop),
Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Zolt·n Pesko (cond); hat[now]ART;
50’25". The origins of this work must rank among the most implausible in operatic history. Feldman meets Beckett on the stage of a darkened theatre, can’t see him, and falls over a curtain. He invites Beckett for lunch, at which Beckett only drinks a beer. Beckett says he doesn’t like opera; Feldman sympathises. Beckett says he doesn’t like his words being set to music; Feldman says he doesn’t much like setting words. Impasse. Yet by the end of the ‘lunch’ Beckett has already written down some words, which ultimately become the 87-word text of Neither. |
| One could probably make a case for Neither marking the start of Feldman’s ‘late period’, not just because of its length (which bears no relation whatsoever to the brevity of the text), but because of the constantly changing patterns that weave through the piece. Be that as it may, it’s certainly one of Feldman’s masterpieces: a brooding, claustrophobic work of remarkable beauty and intensity. Clearly, it’s not ‘opera’ in any conventional sense (unless one wants to regard it as a distant epilogue to Schoenberg’s Erwartung), but it is, in its own way, theatrical. That is, the music somehow suggests the space of a theatre, even before the singer has entered. The performance is gripping, and the CD is a must for Feldman enthusiasts, or indeed for anyone wanting to come to grips with Feldman’s later work. | |
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