David Leisner is probably
best known – certainly in Europe – as
a guitarist. His recordings include
a much-praised set of the complete solo
guitar works of Villa-Lobos (AZICA ACD-71211),
a Bach recital (AZICA ACD-71210)
and the guitar concerto by Alan Hovhaness,
with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Gerald Schwarz on Naxos
8.559294.
review
On this issue from
Çedille, however, it is Leisner
the composer that we get to hear. He
turns out to be a writer of lively,
engaging chamber music, not especially
innovative perhaps, but always well
thought-out, sensitive to instrumental
techniques and colours and always rhythmically
interesting. On the evidence of this
present CD, Leisner is a composer who
responds particularly well to the stimulus
provided by literary or visual sources.
The earliest work here,
Dances in the Madhouse, takes
its inspiration from a lithograph by
the American artist George Bellows (1882-1925)
called Dance in a Madhouse
(it can be seen online).
Leisner elaborates Bellows’s image,
creating four dances: ‘Tango Solitaire’,
for a woman dancing alone; ‘Waltz for
the Old Folks’, for an elderly pair
untroubled by their madness; ‘Ballad
for the Lonely’, a response to the presence
in Bellows’s image of two profoundly
unhappy women; ‘Samba!’, for a couple
dancing pretty wildly. The music is
quirky, the familiar dance rhythms occasionally
distorted or lost, though usually reasserted
during the course of each dance. ‘Tango
Solitaire’ has some lovely melodic writing
for the flute, while ‘Ballad for the
Lonely’ is a poignant, desperate miniature.
‘El Coco’ also takes
a visual image as a starting point –
this time a print by Goya, ‘Que viene
el Coco’ (see online),
in which two children seek the protection
of their mother when approached by a
kind of hooded bogeyman. Leisner’s music,
with its nervous fragments finally resolved
into a longer melodic line nicely evokes
both fear (the guitar at times mimics
the threat, real or imagined, posed
by the bogeyman) and final comfort.
Leisner’s familiarity with, and understanding
of, the Spanish guitar idiom is very
evident here.
‘Trittico’, the composer’s
notes tell us, echoes the form of a
triptych, a three-panelled painting;
this time, however, no specific painting
is alluded to and the music is more
abstract than programmatic. Here the
Cavatina Duo is joined by cellist Katinka
Kleijn, whose presence thickens the
texture interestingly, especially in
the more complex central movement –
as in a Renaissance triptych, the aesthetic
centre of gravity of ‘Trittico’ is to
be found in its central panel. There
is an attractive contrast between the
more fleeting movement of the two outer
sections and the slower, weightier,
emotionally denser music of the central
section (in which Kleijn’s cello is
particularly prominent).
‘Acrobats’ has an origin
in literature rather than the visual
arts. Leisner’s starting point was a
short story, ‘The Tumblers’ by Nathan
Englander (from For the Relief of
Unbearable Urges, 2000). In it
a group of Polish Jews, destined for
the concentration camps, are mistakenly
put on a train full of circus performers
on tour for the entertainment of the
Nazis. Leisner’s piece imagines the
Jewish prisoners going on stage to ‘entertain’
with some precarious acrobatics, their
actions obviously having a larger relevance
to their life-and-death situation. The
music seeks – with fair success – to
evoke their psychological state in these
extraordinary circumstances, full of
abrupt changes of direction, emotional
switches, losses of balance, temporary
restorations of balance. There is some
mildly grotesque humour here, part of
the larger poignancy of the whole. Again
in three movements (‘In the Wings’-‘Flashback’-‘Up
in the Air’) the interplay between Moliner’s
flute and Azabagic’s guitar is particularly
impressive in ‘Acrobats’, a fine, emotionally
subtle piece, evocative of tension and
phoney exhilaration alike, of simple
fear and glimmers of hope (real or delusory).
‘Nostalgia’ and ‘Extremes’
are more abstract in conception and
origin than the pieces discussed so
far. ‘Nostalgia’ was apparently first
written as the third movement of a sonata
for violin and guitar, before achieving
an independent existence of its own
in a version for flute and guitar. Within
its pretty straightforward A-B-A structure,
the piece has the charm of a slightly
sugary nostalgia, with a few passages
of more directly passionate involvement.
‘Extremes’ is the disc’s second trio,
in which clarinettist Joshua Rubin joins
the Cavatina Duo. Its two movements
are headed, simply enough ‘Introverted’
and ‘Extroverted’ and they very much
live up to their names. The first is
slow, brooding, darkly chromatic, with
the colours of clarinet and flute very
effectively juxtaposed in some rather
knotted counterpoint; the second movement
is energetic, altogether more open in
from and emotion, though the complex
interweaving of melodic lines for clarinet
and flute is clearly another aspect
of the same relationship as presented
in the preceding movement.
Leisner’s music is
not strikingly original, but it is intelligent,
well made and everywhere marked by an
acute ear for instrumental colour. This
strongly tonal chamber music has an
attractive intimacy and is well performed
by all concerned. It also benefits from
an excellent recorded sound.
Glyn Pursglove