Interjecting the towering figure of Arnold Schoenberg into the vast and expansive American landscape of simultaneous open possibilities and sense of pessimism at the same time is one of the great events in American musical history. Schoenberg stands in America as Wagner did in Europe; love him or hate him; you still have to deal with him one way or another. Three of the composers on this disc (hint: not Higdon) did just that, and their various reactions to this phenomenon produced music that is curiously similar in many ways, spiritual ways, while being radically different in style.
Take minimalism for instance. I don’t like the word anymore than you do, but it did stick, and when we speak of it we all have a common understanding of what we are going to hear. John Adams is about as far away from Schoenberg as you can imagine, but being of West Coast origin he could not ignore the Great Serialist either, and even a firm rejection of it is in a sense a way of embracing the ethos. Adams claims that after Klinghoffer he came to appreciate the very idea of melody even more, and one can hear it in this current piece, Road Movies, though his treatment is something akin to watching the sand fly from the actions of a whirling dervish. Likewise, Schoenberg himself lamented that fact that all he ever really wanted was for people leaving the concert hall to be humming one of his “tunes”. What both these composers have done is cause us to reassess what we once thought melody was, and in the spoon-fed culture of popular music, this is no easy thing to do. What Adams shows is that melody can exist in places we never thought about, including rhythm and the general impressions thrown off by the overall structure of a piece. Road Movies is just that sort of experience, and there are few pieces more blatantly American than this one.
Carl Ruggles is the same way in that his American sensibilities also cause us to constantly review and renew our expectations. This piece culled together from sketches and warily given here as a “better some than none” option, show more clearly the Schoenberg influence in its atonal structure. But even then we sense that Ruggles is doing something to enhance the whole concept, and what is actually “atonal” doesn’t really feel so; at least not now it doesn’t, after the passage of so many years, and when we can actually listen to the thorniest music of Ives with a familiarity and relaxed stance. Mood sums up the work quite perceptively—it is simply that, nothing else, and one just goes along with it.
I must confess that Lou Harrison has always been puzzling to me. His anti-art art is one that has to be taken on its own terms or not taken at all. Most of the time I opt for the latter. This work seems different—Harrison is primarily a lyricist (some would say that is all he is), but the suite of short pieces that comprise this Grand Duo (do the Schubertian allusions mean anything?) let us enter calmly and quietly into his world and work. This is beautiful music, and though it hardly convinces me of the veracity of everything he wrote, at least for this point in time it persuades.
It is strange that we have to switch coasts to come to the best work on this disc, and the opener. Jennifer Higdon is rapidly establishing herself as one of the finest composers in the world in many years, and her imagination and craftsmanship are simply second to none. String Poetic is a series of descriptive movements that not only move themselves, but draw the listener into an environment where we can almost experience the activity without actually being there. The music is varied, interesting, propulsive, meditative, and stirring. One waits with nervous anticipation each new composition from this woman’s pen, and this one (2006) does not disappoint.
Production values are very high on this disc – great notes and presentation, as Cedille moves into the forefront of quality-value companies. Jennifer Koh needs no introduction at this point; suffice it to say that her playing of these works is fully persuasive and committed, and she seems to have the idiom in her blood, as one would expect of this American-born gal. Reiko Uchido hardly lacks confidence in her sterling partnership, and one feels a sense of American pride by being able to participate even by listening to a disc that takes pride of place among chamber music releases for this year.
