American Record Guide Reviews A Place Between March 2010
Tavener, Part, Knaifel, Silvestrov, Gorecki, Cage
Louth Contemporary Music Society
LCM 5901—65 minutes (cdbaby.com—800- BUYMYCD)
The Louth Contemporary Music Society brings world-renowned contemporary musicians, performers, and composers for performances and educational work in Louth, Ireland. In this release, a group of musicians (Patricia Rosario,soprano; the Callino Quartet; Michael McHale, piano; Ioana Petcu-Colan, violin; Vourneen Ryan, flute; and Stephen Kelly, percussion) performs a group of works by composers who have been attracted by spirituality or who otherwise cultivate a sense of stillness in their music. Most of this music is resolutely triadic, and a few of the works flirt with the idea of a musically distant past, as in Pärt’s Da Pacem Domine (2004-2008).
These musicians are some of the most selfless I know, for the liner notes offer no information about them whatsoever. But maybe that’s part of the point, for the overwhelming feeling I have listening to this is of some timeless, eternal music that rejects almost every sense of the modern in favor of simple and sometimes naive musical gestures.
The two opening tracks are representative.John Tavener’s Ikon is a very straightforward string quartet work where a simple melody in tenths unfolds lazily over a pedal point of D and A. Pärt’s Hymn for a Great City, a two piano piece (both parts played by McHale and knitted together through the more mundane mysteries of postproduction) was written in honor of New York. A dominant-tonic progression in D-flat alternates with other two-chord progressions, later ornamented by modest arpeggios.
Now I’m not one to dismiss tonal-sounding or very simple-sounding music out of hand. And yet, as I quipped to a friend, these two pieces are very 1988: they bespeak a worldview that’s very hard to accept after Nicolae Ceausescu, the Tiananmen Square Protests, Darfur, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.Our world is too complex for these works to be as credible as they once were. To be sure, some of it endures: Pärt’s Tabula Rasa still transports me, but Hymn to a Great City seems to offer little more than transient escapism.
Two other works are more impressive: Alexander Knaifel’s Oh Heavenly King (1994, rev. 2009) and Henryk Gorecki’s Good Night.Perhaps I like them better because they include a singer (Rosario is perfect for this music). But the two pieces are also more elusive more ambiguous in tonality and in timbre.Gorecki’s piece, a lamentation for Michael Vyner (music director of the London Sinfonietta from 1972 until he died in 1989), recalls the desolate grief of his third symphony and rings as true as that work: its scale (some 30 minutes) also seems more fitting for this sort of music.
My favorite work of all is a short one and seems to share many of the same qualities as its neighbors: Valentin Silvestrov’s Ikon is a string quartet piece that explores an arresting turning melodic figure that cadences with a perfect fifth and then repeats, each repetition sounding a step lower. Every now and then sense a shadow of Landini, or perhaps of Machaut. Yet when the work is over I want to hear it again. And then again. This is music of mystery and it moves me very, very deeply: Silvestrov’s Ikon testifies to the continuing relevance of such music despite the sadness and complexity of today’s world.
HASKINS
