Joan Tower: Made in America

This Naxos recording features the remarkable "Made in America," as well as "Tambor" and the two-part "Concerto for Orchestra" by one of America's finest composers.

The title piece was commissioned by the Ford Motor Company Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts and was organized through the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet The Composer.  What Tower did was to develop something of a "fantasy on the theme," as Gail Wein's helpful notes suggest, based on a classic piece of musican Americana.  Tower stated:

When I started composing this piece, the song America the Beautiful kept coming into my consciousness and eventually became the main theme for the work . . . this theme is challenged by other more aggressive and dissonant ideas that keep interrupting, interjecting, unsettling it . .  a musical struggle is heard throughout the work.  Perhaps it was my unconscious reaction to the challenge of how do we keep America beautiful, dignified and free.

Not only is the piece full of richness, powerful dynamics, daring harmonics and dignity, but Tower wrote it to be performed in all fifty states, which took place through 65 smaller American orchestras between October 2005 and June 2007.

"Tambor" is Spanish for "drum" and there is an undeniably powerful rhythmic emphasis in this piece that puts percussion front and center.  Tower noted that the percussion section of the orchestra was "to influence the behavior of the rest of the orchestra to the point that the other instruments began to act more and more like a percussion section themselves."  The work, which premiered in 1998, begins with an explosion of percussive elements during the orchestra introduction and the tremendous performance by various types of percussion is underscored by an intense and colorful performance by the orchestra.

The "Concerto for Orchestra" takes its cue from the masterful 1940s composition by the great Béla Bartók, which was featured here on this blog in February 2014.  As with Bartók, Tower utilized soloists, duettists and and sections to develop a powerful and striking piece that is challenging and virtuosic.  To write a piece that is so directly linked to a modern masterpiece is an indication both of respect for the earlier work and a personal statement by Tower about how the form can be utilized in a highly personal way even while influenced by the other.

This disc won three Grammy Awards in 1998 for Best Classical Album, Best Classical Contemporary Composition, and Best Orchestral Performance.  This last award is testament to the astounding work of the Nashville Symphony and its conductor Leonard Slatkin, the latter of which has won several Grammys and been nominated for dozens and has worked for the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra among others.

This album is a perfect example of great composition enhanced by the highest form of excellence in performance by the orchestra.  Naxos deserves great credit for realizing a project of the highest order.

Witold Lutoslawski: Concerto for Orchestra/Three Poems/Mi-Parti

This excellent Naxos disc featuring the work of Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994) comprises his majestic, folk-tinged "Concerto for Orchestra" and the serial-based "Mi-Parti" performed by the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Antoni Wit, and "Three Poems," another twelve-tone type work by the Camerata Silesia, directed by Anna Szostak.

It is readily acknowledged that the "Concerto for Orchestra" from 1954 reflects a "neo-classical" bent with leanings towards the work of the great Bela Bartok.  It also has much of the grandeur of Romantic-era symphonic works with modern takes on rhythm and harmony.  The remarkable third movement, over twice as long as the preceding two, is a wonderful ride through a sweeping array of themes and emotional content, admirably perfomed by the orchestra.

There is an interesting and notable contrast with the 22-minute "Three Poems by Henri Michaux," which premiered in 1963, obviously beginning with the use of a chorale.  But, it is also the use of poetry from a French surrealist that marks a shift in Lutoslawski's sonic palette.  The composer is quoted in the liners as stating that Michaux's work allowed the composer "to remain absolutely natural as a musician, while following the form of his poetry, because of its formal and rhythmic variety."  It was also noted in the liners that Lutoslawski "set out to find verses that in some way would be near" the form of the composition he already had in mind.  To the composer, "the word is united with the music, that they form a fusion" and that "music adds to the word."

The poetry is from three works, "Thoughts," which is rooted in doubt and uncertainty (thoughts wonderfully swimming / who glide in us, between us, far from us / far from enlightening us, far from understanding); "The Great Contest," with its visceral language, (He seizes him and throws him down on the ground / He drags him and assaults him / He pracks him and mauls him and makes him squeal / He trashes him and mashes him) and consonant sonic barrage and harshly articulated vocalizing; and "Rest in Misfortune," which looks inward as the poet implores Misfortune to "sit down, rest, let us rest a little, you and I, rest, you find me, you try me, you prove me it.  I am your downfall."

The work of such composers as Stockhausen and Xenakis come to mind when hearing much of "Three Poems" though only in the broadest sense and with "The Great Contest" especially.  "Rest in Misfortune" is calm, contemplative and a world away from its predecessor.

"Mi-Parti" from 1976 is a single movement orchestral piece based on Lutoslawski's finding a definition of the title as "composed of two equal but unlike parts," though the "partition" is not binary, but involves several "threads" in which "each of them develops while interfering one with the other and represent an action."  Each starts slowly and builts to a heightened state of activity, with the composer highlighting "color rather in spite of myself" as he used that ambiguous word to try to depict what happens acoustically in the music with respect to "warm" and "cold" elements that swirl in a polyphony of symphonic sound.  The building of activity, dynamic tempo changes and interesting instrumentation to create those "colors" make this a compelling and exciting work.

The "Overture for Strings" is a short 5-minute piece from 1949 that also has shades of Bartok and the writer of the notes, Andrzej Chlopecki, uses the interesting phrase that "the composer wanted to create a super-complete symphonic aphorism" in which only those elements needed are used and that the aphoristic concept is marked by "extreme economy" but without being "ascetic."  With a trio of themes that are very different in technical approach, this overture says a great deal, but no more than necessary, in a relatively short period of time.

One of the most interesting of "modern" composers, Lutoslawski's work is experimental, but highly accessible and this disc shows a range of pieces that distinctly represents his striking output.

Béla Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra/The Miraculous Mandarin/Two Pictures

Béla Bartok (1881-1945) and Franz Liszt (1811-1886) are the best-known composers from Hungary, though they came from very different eras, had varied stylistic concerns, and were dissimilar in other ways. 

Bartok came from a town in what is now Romania, but from Hungarian and German parentage, and his father was an amateur musician (working as the head of an agricultural college) while his mother provided him his first piano lessons. 

After his father died when Bartok as a boy, his mother took up teaching at Bratislava in what is now Slovakia, bordering Hungary and Austria.  Though the young man could have studied in Vienna, the great music center, he chose to go to Budapest to continue his musical education. 

In his mid-twenties he began teaching in that city's Academy of Music and soon immersed himself in the folk music of Hungary and nearby areas, including Romania.  Because of the remarkable political, social and cultural history of southeastern Europe, including its many years as part of the Ottoman Empire emanating from Turkey, the cross-breeding of music there with antecedents from the Middle East and from Europe allowed Bartok to develop a composing style that reflected those influences.  His work included such pieces as "Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs" and "Romanian Folk Dances."

This Sony Classics recording under its "Essential Classics" banner was an early purchase, back in the first years of the 90s, for this listener of Bartok's music.  It presents orchestral works from very different eras of the composer's career, ranging from the early "Two Pictures from Orchestra" from 1910 to a suite for a dance and pantomime called "The Miraculous Mandarin" from about a decade later to the masterpiece "Concerto for Orchestra" that proved to be one of his last works, dating from 1943, after Bartok fled war-torn Hungary for the United States.  The performances by the famed conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra date from 1962 and 1963.

The latter work, spanning about 37 minutes, seems like a contradiction in his titling, but the composer observed that, while a concerto typically highlights a solo instrument with an orchestral accompaniment, the virtuosity of both justify the use of the term.  In any case, this five-movement piece has moments of mystery, exoticism, unusual groupings of instruments, vivid emotionalism in the melodies, and compelling tonal colorations and textures. 

"The Miraculous Mandarin" begins with a dramatic swirling of sounds from strings and brass and maintains its frenetic tempo and sounds for the first minute and a half in what was then a controversial tale involving a woman forced into prostitution and the attempt of a mandarin to take her away from her pimps before it moves into a different type of dramatic sound, involving what might be car horns and other reflections of an urban environment, leavened with some quieter passages involving woodwinds and then the return of drama reflecting the conflict between the mandarin and the pimps.  There is a great richness, a superb sense of dramatic timing, and a fascinating grouping of instrumentation on this remarkable piece.

"Two Pieces" has an affinity for the work of French composer Claude Debussy, in that Bartok scores these two parts, "In Full Flower" and "Village Dance" in ways that employ dreamy melodies and lush backgrounds reminiscent of the influential Debussy's invocation of nature and Impressionistic approaches to sound.  With such instruments as harp and celesta, the generous use of tremolo with the stringed instruments and other elements, these works still have a blueprint of Bartok's future use of unusual rhythms, groupings of instruments and sense of dramatic dynamism.

This recording is a nice survey of the long career of one of the great composers of the first half of the 20th century.  Sadly, Bartok, who was strongly against the invasion of Hungary by the Nazi regime, fled his native country in October 1940, though his older son by a first wife remained in Hungary and survived the war while the composer, his second wife and their son moved to New York.

He was not particularly appreciated in his new country and he struggled to compose and find work.  In 1944, he was diagnosed with leukemia and the disease moved quickly.  Still, in his last years he managed to not only complete the popular "Concerto for Orchestra" but also an excellent solo violin sonata for the legendary Yehudi Menuhin and a third piano concerto. 

At age 64, in late September 1945, the composer died and only ten persons were present at his funeral.  Although he was buried in New York, Bartok's remains were removed to his native Hungary where he received a state funeral in 1988, just before the fall of the Communist regime there.  Fortunately, his music is better appreciated in this country than it was during his final years and there is a series of piano works on the budget Naxos label by Hungarian pianist Jenó Jandó that will be highlighted here some day.