The subtitle both on the striking CD cover and the track-list states
simply 'Music from the 50th'. Would that be a fiftieth annual festival
somewhere, perhaps? Or fiftieth anniversary celebrations? Actually, it is a
rather silly error, a mistranslation from the German: it should in fact read
'’50s', as in '1950s'. Like many who have gone before, MDG learn the
hard way that there is no substitute for a native-language proof-reader.
Happily, there is nothing embarrassing about Steffen
Schleiermacher's programme, which reads like a who's who of modernism. He
begins and ends with two different versions of Christian Wolff's 'sonata'
for three pianos - all recorded separately by Schleiermacher himself, and
overdubbed. The listener is taken on a generous but not necessarily
gemütlich whistle-stop tour of the now-old new; this from the
decade where ideas of what music could be like changed dramatically - at
least in some quarters.
Most of the works, it must be said, are primarily of curiosity
value. They are too amorphous to be memorable, too short to make any big
statements. Arguably, Dallapiccola's
Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera
and Ustvolskaya's Sonata no.4 are the most important by a distance. The
former is significant because it is, youthful pieces aside, Dallapiccola's
only work for piano. He was almost unique in his dedication to a lyrical
kind of twelve-tone serialism, the
Quaderno Musicale being a prime
example.
As for Ustvolskaya - appearing here in its German form,
'Ustwolskaja' - in
A Guide to Galina Ustvolskaya's Music, broadcaster
Tom Service, writing in
The Guardian, refers to her music's "sheer,
brutalising power: it has a terrifying and transcendent physicality; the
inescapability of an asteroid firing into earth; an elementality that's both
horrifying and thrilling ..." Many critics thrive on hyperbole, but even
Ustvolskaya's much-invoked Sonata no.6 is nowhere near as brutal or
cacophonous as some writers claim. That is unless the listener's ears are
particularly offended by lots of big, deep, loud chords and a sustaining
pedal almost constantly down. The Fourth Sonata is less frightening in any
case, although it can hardly be said to reach out to the audience. The
booklet incidentally gives the wrong composition date - it should be 1957,
not 1953.
Schleiermacher's intention was actually to offer a "wild medley of
opposed composers coexisting peacefully", an idea inspired by John Cage and
Alison Knowles' book
Notations. This is a motley collection of score
pages from 269 composers, published in 1969 - not 1967, as Schleiermacher
writes. Yet his "broad spectrum [...] only from the Fifties" has no
Hindemith, Weinberg, Mompou, Milhaud or any composer writing for the piano
in that decade usually thought of as more or less tradition-oriented.
Lutoslawski's rather pretty
Bucolics does offer some tuneful
listening, and Dallapiccola, Chou, Dessau and Engelmann are all relatively
accessible. It is fair to say overall that Schleiermacher has gone with his
own specialist preferences (see below) in putting together his recital.
Of the remainder of the programme, a number of pieces are
conspicuous by their brevity. Whilst some will doubtless consider that a
blessing, even the more intrepid listener is given no more than a quick
taste of what composers as diverse as Dessau, Wolff and Lutoslawski were up
to at the time. That the pieces from Bussotti and Hauer derive their
substance from graphics, whether purely abstract or loosely based on musical
notation, is an interesting fact that can barely be touched upon in the
space allocated to them.
Still, no matter how obscure or tricky the music, whether
technically or conceptually, Schleiermacher is more than equal to it. His
phenomenal discography, both as a soloist and as a chamber musician,
includes many CDs dedicated to Cage, Feldman, Glass, the Second Viennese
School and indeed Satie - the composer he presumably considers the first
true modernist. Such is his dedication to the cause, parents note, that he
has even recorded a disc of avant-garde music - Gubaidulina, Kurtág,
Lachenmann and his own - 'For Children' (MDG 613 1520-2).
Sound quality is very good. In the German-English-French booklet,
Schleiermacher's own notes are very interesting, eloquent and well
translated.
Byzantion
Contact at artmusicreviews.co.uk
