Stanley Walden studied composition with Ben Weber and was a clarinettist
for a number of years with the New York Philharmonic and the Met
orchestra. He has taught widely – at Juilliard and Eastman amongst
others – and has long been active in musical theatre. A versatile
man he’s worked as an actor and theatre director and has written
film scores as well. He wrote the musical Oh! Calcutta
amongst much else.
Maquettes have been
in the news recently. A maquette of Antony Gormley’s vast sculpture
of The Angel of the North has been conservatively estimated
at over £1m. Walden’s musically descriptive quintet of maquettes
is far less imposing. The opening Fanfare is an arrestingly
dissonant call to arms. The composer’s own written notes are
remarkably terse in places; he writes, very much to the point,
that the second in the sequence, called Song, ‘is about solo
and accompaniment’. The third, Texture, feasts on the potential
for colour whilst the fourth is jazz influenced. The vital,
vibrant Latin-American feel of the finale is explained by virtue
of its having been written for Chucho Valdes, a Cuban pianist
and composer.
Sh’mah – duo for
violin and cello was written in 2002. This is largely based
on three traditional Jewish sources though they don’t become
– or at least don’t seem to become – obvious until the last
section. Much of the writing is strenuous, and Walden inflects
pitch for expressive uses. That keeningly allusive Jewish element
makes a sure statement. Five Similes for piano (1989) is by
some way the oldest work to be recorded. They are in essence
memorial pieces - brief but not epigrammatic, deft but not obscure.
They don’t all adopt quiescent and contemplative states; on
the contrary, they seem to summon up personality traits unconstrained
by the expected memorials of death. One in particular, Like
bullets, is loquacious and at times quite strident – whereas
Like a smile, the last, is reflective and employs more
impressionist hues.
The Trio for the
Brahmsian combination of horn, violin and piano is quite a big
work cast in four movements. Pitch twisting still features in
Walden’s vocabulary, as does relatively stark, terse, tense
material – especially in the second movement where we also find
a chorale-like theme for piano and violin slowly emerging. A
neo-baroque figure emerges on the piano and there’s a slight
Britten Lachrymae feel to its gradual unravelling. The
scherzo is a ‘salsa and trio’ – good fun though not too much
so. Walden is on record as having said that this work was written
‘out of a controlled sadness and rage at the events of September
11, 2001.’ It’s in the finale that this seems most appropriate
– a Battaglia of bruisingly wide-ranging emotions, from the
stentorian to single lines, ruminative and disbelieving.
We have some first
class, sensitively authoritative performances here. Walden’s
music is never obvious and can be subtly withdrawn.
Jonathan Woolf
Spectrum Concerts
Berlin (Ya-Faei Chuang (piano); Robert Levin (piano); Julia-Maria
Kretz (violin); Jens Peter Maintz (cello); Bernhard Krug (horn))
Frank Dodge, founder and artistic director 
