John Corigliano can be a maddeningly frustrating composer. Sometimes he is capable of great beauty, even profound musical sensibilities, while other times find him on more pedantic, almost cacophonous auditory excursions. I have had very pleasant moments listening to his music, but also some chewy ones. This disc offers a nice collection of mostly elevating sentiments, in superb sound played by an almost excellent orchestra.
Phantasmagoria (noted here as the “world premiere” recording, though in fact it had an earlier incarnation for piano and cello on Sony in 2000) is essentially the best music from his highly praised but pretty much ignored opera The Ghosts of Versailles. The opera, debuting at the Metropolitan in 1992, drew much acclaim, but has been lost in the shuffle ever since, though there are rumors of revival in 2010 if you happen to be around then. The first go-around was a stimulating visual event, but the scenes and scenarios disjointed and difficult to follow, and the music frankly uneven. Hearing this suite paints a whole new picture of Corigliano’s accomplishment, and saves for posterity some exceedingly fine music.
To Music is a subtle deconstruction of Schubert’s lied “An die Musik”, where each phrase gets some highlighting and commentary culminating in great panoply, effectively reversing the emotional effect of the original, but offering an unusual view through a different colored glass.
It was just a little while ago that Helene Grimaud’s recording of Fantasia on an Ostinato was released on DGG, and while this one offers a load of color and aural effects, I am not quite sure if I don’t prefer the more pristine clarity and Stravinsky-like shimmering of the piano version. Corigliano is like Arvo Part in his recycling of music, so there will doubtless be other versions of this, but one must assume that the orchestral version is intended to be the definitive statement of this music. In whatever guise, the piece is carefully clever and really inventive, hinting at Beethoven’s concise second movement from the seventh symphony, but never beating you over the head with it, not unlike the always masterly treatment of variations by composers such as Benjamin Britten. Ostinato it may be, but Corigliano makes it into a tone poem of unknown province, a mysterious tale of peoples and places lacking names and locales. In other words, this is a wonderful piece.
I cannot in good conscience make that claim for the last work here, a suite from the film score Altered States called Three Hallucinations. Some movie music is meant to stand on its own, but not this one. It is so wedded to the screen that a lack of visual handlebars sends us plummeting into a chaotic sound world where motives and themes lack coherence and inhibit sound musical understanding. This works well in the movie, no doubt, but the divorce from that medium proves most disconcerting, despite moments of serenity and lyric beauty.
The sound is as usual for Ondine, and that is high praise indeed. The Tampere Philharmonic is a solid orchestra, adept at the Corigliano idiom, but has some definite weaknesses when the brass attempt some of the composer’s more challenging high parts. But this is still a good introduction to the composer, matched only by Leonard Slatkin’s 1996 St. Louis recording (on RCA) of the piano concerto, along with an equally fine reading of the Fantasia.
— Steven Ritter
