MICHAEL NYMAN: Mozart 252 (playlist below) – Michael Nyman Band (+ on last 3 tracks: Hilary Summers, contralto, Andrew Slater, bass – MN Records MNRCD 113, 50:18 **** [Distr. by Allegro]:
Nyman begins his notes by admitting that this album was originally designed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart – 2006. But he missed the boat by two years, so it’s Mozart 252. The music of the 11 tracks here comes from two previous Mozart-derived works by Nyman: his soundtrack score for Peter Greenaway’s avant feature Drowning by Numbers, and the final three tracks are from songs and duets he wrote for a 1991 BBC-TV film marking the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death.
While Nyman’s music seems to work well enough scoring Greenaway’s films, hearing some of it without the visuals seems to get on my nerves much more quickly than listening to similar minimalist scores of Philip Glass. It may be due to the almost incessant repeated bass figurations that propel the music along but can get annoying in time. The themes, incidentally, come from various Mozart works. The first two, for example, refer in their titles to Don Giovanni, and that’s their source. The three closing songs are quite a different animal. They use actual texts taken from Mozart’s own letters and riddles. His relationship with his father and with his own mortality are themes addressed in these very touching songs.
TrackList: In Re Don Giovanni, Revisiting the Don, Trysting Fields, Not Knowing the Ropes, Wedding Tango, Wheelbarrow Walk, Fish Beach, Knowing the Ropes, O my Dear Papa, I am an Unusual Thing, Profit and Loss.
– John Sunier