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Chamber Players In Concert for Impact CD ReviewsHarrison
Birtwistle: Refrains and Choruses ObituariesArthur
Berger (1912-2003) |
Review of CD HARRISON BIRTWISTLE: REFRAINS AND CHORUSES DEUX-ELLES, DXL 1019 This release offers a welcome collection of Harrison Birtwistle’s shorter works for small wind groupings with and without keyboard accompaniment, as well as some brief solo piano pieces. A number of these selections, some quite obscure, are otherwise unavailable on CD. The music here spans a broad time frame of nearly fifty years duration; it’s very good, if highly eclectic stuff. Much of the reason the latter description holds has to do with Birtwistle’s stunningly wide ranging influences. One encounters frankly tonal music mirroring Satie (much of the piano selections qualify here, such as the Gymnopedie-like Berceuse de Jeanne [1984], Sad Song [1971], and the early Oockooing Bird [ca. 1950]) and dissonant items displaying Varese-style grit (such as the brief solo piano entry Hector’s Dawn [1987] and the wind quintets Refrains and Choruses [1957] and Five Distances [1992]). This last also spatially spreads its ensemble members in the manner of Henry Brant and utilizes some elements of aleatory. Some of the duos for keyboard and wind instrument make even more wholehearted use of postwar indeterminate techniques: the clarinet/piano selection Linoi (1968) for example demonstrates a loose coordination between the two instruments and in the middle of the work asks the pianist to improvise a vigorous strummed accompaniment on the strings. An Uninterrupted Endless Melody (1991), for oboe and piano, is even more conceptual, having the oboe freely intone a deliberately cyclic line without clear beginning or end over a piano backing that can be chosen from three possible versions—and proceeds to repeat the process through a three movement context. Stravinsky’s practical neoclassic ethos gets updated in Duets for Storab (1983), scored for two flutes. And music from pre-Baroque eras also leaves its mark prominently. Hoquetus Petrus (1995), for two flutes and piccolo trumpet, shows that Birtwistle knows this stuttering Medieval technique intimately well (though one hears Varese rather than Machaut in the pitches chosen). And the otherwise Stravinskian Chorale from a Toy-Shop (1967) is scored, in best Renaissance manner, for whatever five instruments can play the particular parts that comprise the work. In a class by itself is the pointillistic duet Verses (1965) which overlays a clarinet line with debts to Olivier Messiaen upon a Milton Babbitt oriented piano texture. What surprises this critic most is the fact that it all sounds like music written by the same composer. Like Ligeti, Birtwistle somehow is able to project a distinctive voice that does not rely on an inimitable harmonic language to impart uniqueness. And Birtwistle’s structures here, while never referential to anything from the Baroque through Romantic periods, contain a convincing inner logic of their own. Performances are first-rate all the way. The British based Galliard Ensemble (a wind quintet consisting of Kathryn Thomas on flute, Owen Dennis on oboe, Katherine Spencer on clarinet, Helen Simons on bassoon, and Richard Bayliss on horn), joined by guests Mark Law (piccolo trumpet), Robert Manasse (flute), and Richard Shaw (piano), play this challenging music splendidly. Sound and editing are excellent. This disc is very highly recommended. --David Cleary |