David Del Tredici (b. 1937) is an American serial-music-trained composer who left serial and minimalist idioms a long time ago for unbridled neo-Romantic forms; to many musicologist he is for the most part responsible for the resurgence of Romantic and Classic forms in symphonic and chamber music which we are presently witnessing. Other composers included in this rarified field are John Corigliano, Christopher Theofanides, Jennifer Higdon and Essa Peka Salonen just to name a few.
Del Tredici has composed at least ten major symphonic works to this date based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Vintage Alice (1972) is one of them, while Dracula (1999) represents a further transformation still within the neo-Romantic mold. Briefly, Del Tredici – while trained in serial techniques with some minimalist overtones – has been composing in a neo-Romantic idiom for a long time. On auditioning this disc I was struck by his urge to idealize sound (solo instruments and whole ensemble) to produce strong tonal melodies with highly chromatic orchestration and some hints of atonality at times, for very colorful music. His music seems to embrace unrestricted and unbounded individuality, overriding all dogmas for an overwhelmingly unorthodox musical style – one that exhibits a highly-charged personality and captivating emotional vitality.
Although there has been obvious physical transformations in Del Tredici’s life to this date there is an unbroken musical and intellectual continuity in his works and the Alice series is the best example of all, full of expressive forces and soaring vocal lyricism with turbulent orchestral accompaniments. Vintage Alice and Dracula express and expand as well on musical ideas established in early periods, such as the Classical period of Mozart and Haydn, in the making of music which describes “action” through the expansion of formal structures within the composition itself, making the pieces more passionate and expressive than that of “pure music.” Del Tredici’s musical world acknowledges inescapable realities in the world (even if that is a fantasy world) which could only be reached through music that speaks of emotions, feelings and intuition that seeks to discover and arouse further emotions and feelings from the listeners with well timed dissonances and “cyclic” interludes. The best of all examples is his Child Alice (1980) – a symphony in operatic form.
His musical idiom is firmly rooted on tonality and his harmonic vocabulary and contagious rhythms seek to fuse large structural harmonic planning with further chromatic innovations in order to achieve greater fluidity in the musical story and logical contrasts with an expanded harmonic language of previously unused chords, or innovative chord progressions and their precise harmonic function. His emphasis on tonal melody is facilitated by the extensive use of cyclic forms from serial music and unifying devices such as those found in minimalism. While in the pursuit of style Del Tredici has discovered “his” own elements of rhythm, melody and modality that give his music a distinctive character by avoiding the use of any major and/or minor home keys – Vintage Alice has none throughout its 629-bars-long score.
A trademark of Del Tredici is his use of harmonic ambiguity and the technique of moving rapidly between different keys for a seemingly “harmonic chaos” (not really) avoiding establishing a “home” key at all with the striking effect of producing tension between the musical structure and the emotional expression of the sounds. The result is symphonic music characterized by the expression of emotions emphasized by lyrical, songlike melodies, adventurous modulations, and chromatic harmonies with striking use of discords. While the music is denser at times with heavy musical textures that exhibit bold dramatic contrasts he also explores wide ranges of pitch, dynamics and tone colors. The latter applies mostly to Vintage Alice while Dracula is mostly tonally-centered chromatic music with extremely colorful orchestration.
Dracula is a musical rendition based on Alfred Corn’s poem, My Neighbor, the Distinguished Count; basically it is a music-drama of the giocoso kind – an operetta? It is scored for amplified soprano voice (Hila Plitman – with a tremendous three octaves range) and thirteen instrumental players including the use of a theremin, an electronic instrument once rather widely used in Hollywood film scores. Dracula shows the more than twenty years of Del Tredici’s musical/literary transformations still within neo-Romantic music idioms. Vintage Alice’s music is funny while Dracula’s is scary, but funny as well thanks to the many scored percussion effects that make for a lusciously frightening music-drama, rendered just as Vintage Alice – with finesse and unbounded energy by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and Del Tredici himself turned conductor for this occasion.
As far as the sound is concerned this disc with what could have been a knockout in SACD format here within the limits imposed by the 16/44.1 CD format shows all the limitations that sound compression is known for and rends the extreme dynamics of these two symphonic pieces in barely acceptable sound – it might be good enough within the confines of a car but not enough for a good home sound system. Also, remember this disc is less than 48 minutes long.
Final words: if one is not that conservative in musical terms Del Tredici’s music is there to prove that new tonal acoustic music is well and alive – we already knew him to be one of the major musical and intellectual forces of our time. I highly recommended this disc (even as short as it is) as well as all others in Del Tredici’s Alice series; this composer is a must for all who love modern music!
– John Namaric
