This latest release
from Kupferman’s own Soundspells label
is now sadly posthumous. This notwithstanding,
all the volumes in the series are still
available to admirers of the composer
through Albany. Two of the works in
this valedictory volume – though it’s
strongly to be hoped that more will
be appearing and soon – date from the
last year of Kupferman’s life. The Symphony
for Strings, known as And Five Quartets
is an earlier work written in 1986.
As often before in this series the honours
are taken by the Czech National Symphony
Orchestra under Paul Freeman but no
locations or dates are given.
Invisible Borders
is cast in four movements and was conceived
as a musical poem, with statement of
the themes developed freely. The opening
Adagio cleaves rather to the Mahler-Berg
axis and is full of disconsolate brass
calls, a sinuous bass line and a sense
of coiled tension. As ever the percussion
strikes a note of Comedia Dell’arte
– the ironic, sardonic and satiric intent
of which is occluded, though the nose
thumbing is not. There are hints of
a strong influence, Bartók. The
lone flute soaring above the jagged
upper strings and lyric lower ones takes
the music to sparer, more rarefied vistas,
with a ghostly marimba-like shimmer
to end the movement. The restless Deciso
scherzando revives the percussion’s
jeering – but in the main this is dramatic,
cinematic music, restless, unsettled,
full of pom-poms and solo piano and
all manner of percussive chicanery.
In the slow movement the flute reappears.
The solo violin generate together with
the flute a burgeoning warmth with a
ghostly dream-like cello solo. The music
seems to refract and become absorbed
by itself – before a renewed turbulence
leaves us unresolved, hanging on. The
finale is brittle, lurching into atonality,
pans out into a solo for the piano,
as if the music were groping for both
complexity and simplicity simultaneously.
It can’t last and we end in tough ambiguity.
This is the major work
on the disc – austere and cackling,
Mahlerian and verbose, transient and
penetrating – a complete work that says
much but never easily. It reveals but
never shows; it lifts the lid and then
screws it down again. When the Air
Moves also comes from the last
months of the composer’s life. It has
a strong rhythmic charge, atonal in
parts and highly chromatic. There’s
swirling colour and drama in its fourteen
minutes. Again it’s tough but not unyielding
and in its bell episodes it carries
a charge, a sense of momentum. Finally
there is And Five Quartets (Symphony
for Strings) an innovative work in which
it’s necessary for five string quartets
to sit apart in a semi-circle with the
conductor in the centre and free to
move to the ensembles. The fifth quartet
is the only irregular one, consisting
of two violins and two double basses.
It divides pretty equally into three
sections; the first has a propulsive
rhythmic counterpoint overlapping like
some huge organism. The second is lyric,
folk-like and aerated and generates
a true sense of a single tensile unanimity
whereas the dissonant drive of the finale
has a Bartókian chug that may
threaten dissolution but recovers, freshly,
to conclude.
The major work here
is the late Invisible Borders but
Kupferman’s admirers will find much
to perplex, excite, rouse, alarm, concern
and, ultimately, warm them. He’s not
always an easy listen and there’s little
of his jazz-ward looking side here.
Is integrity an over-used word? Well
then, Kupferman had integrity.
Jonathan Woolf
Czech National Symphony Orchestra/Paul Freeman
