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Traditions and Transformations:
Sounds of Silk Road Chicago Ernest BLOCH (1880-1959) Schelomo (1916) [22:39] Byambasuren SHARAV (b.1952) Legend of Herlen (2000) [10:58] Lou Harrison (1917-2003) Pipa Concerto (1997) [22:17] Sergei PROKOFIEV (1891-1953) Scythian Suite, Op.20 (1915) [21:11] *
Yo-Yo
Ma (cello, morin khuur)
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Silk Road Ensemble
Wu Man (pipa), Miguel Harth-Bedova (conductor), *Alan Gilbert
(conductor)
rec. 12-13, 17 April 2007 (Bloch, Sharav, Harrison), 17-19,
22 May 2007, Orchestra Hall, Symphony Centre, Chicago
Sung text provided in translation. CSO-RESOUND
CSOR901801 [79:24]
This
is a very miscellaneous collection, but then followers
of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road project will have come to
expect nothing less. This particular CD was recorded as
the climax of the Project’s year-long association with
the city of Chicago. During that year Yo-Yo Ma and the
Silk Road ensemble interacted with the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra. This involved a series of events which celebrated
and explored many kinds of intercultural musical exchange,
going beyond the specific cultural meetings and transferences
which the Silk Road itself facilitated.
Here
we have a sampling of such interactions, some rather more
familiar and ‘mainstream’ than others. Of Jewish background,
born in Switzerland, and a student in Belgium, Germany
and France and resident in the USA from 1916 until his
death - bar a return to Europe in the 1930s - Ernest Bloch
was something of a one-man intercultural ‘event’ in himself
and his music was always open to a variety of influences.
Subtitled a ‘Hebraic Rhapsody for cello and orchestra’, Schelomo (Solomon)
was written between December 1915 and February 1916. Bloch’s
own programme notes for the piece spoke of the cello as “the
reincarnated voice of King Solomon” and suggested that
the orchestra was “the voice of his age … his world … his
experience”. The languorous dances and slow, meditative
music of much of the work’s first section are well and
expressively played by Ma and the CSO under Harth-Bedova,
the note of despair, of the all-embracing sentiments of Ecclesiastes (of
which Solomon was, traditionally, the author) – “Vanity
of vanities, all is Vanity” – never far from the surface.
But perhaps this performance doesn’t quite do justice to
what Bloch called the “complete negation” which characterises
the work’s conclusion, where the playing seems a bit too
ready to settle for rhetorical effect rather than substance.
But, overall, this is a performance which puts a good case
for the work and is well worth hearing.
The
other familiar work is Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite -
in which the CSO is conducted by Alan Gilbert - which grew
from the young composer’s fascination with the nomads of
the steppes, without too much in the way of direct borrowings
from the music of such tribes. The modern listener is most
likely to find in it a slightly politer, more westernised
version of The Rite of Spring and indeed this work,
like Stravinsky’s, was grounded in the composer’s collaboration
with Diaghilev. Prokofiev’s rhythms are less complex and
fierce than Stravinsky’s, the sense of ritualistic violence
less intense, though the orchestration is brilliant and
striking. The reeds of the CSO are particularly impressive
in ‘The Adoration of Veles and Ala’, the first movement,
while there is disciplined orchestral power galore in the
opening of the second movement, ‘The Enemy God and the
Dance of the Black Spirits’. Somehow, though, the performance
doesn’t quite do full justice to the ominous, distinctly ‘Russian’ music
of this movement, lacking the ultimate in intensity and
drive. The dark evocativeness of the first part of ‘Night’ is
more convincing and the final movement, ‘’Lolly’s Glorious
Departure and the Ceremonial Procession of the Sun’ catches
fire in the closing imagery of the rising sun. For all
the efforts of orchestra and conductor, it is hard to see
Prokofiev’s ballet music - striking as much of it is -
as more than superficially involving any real cultural
interaction.
From
that point of view, Lou Harrison’s Pipa Concerto is
more richly suggestive. The pipa is, to put it crudely
but briefly, a kind of Chinese lute, with a pear-shaped
wooden body. Harrison’s ‘concerto’ is very obviously the
work of a man who, by the date of its composition, was
steeped in oriental musical traditions and had given real
thought to how they might exist creatively alongside western
instruments and conventions. For Harrison the interface
between oriental and occidental musics is familiar territory,
a territory in which he can be unaffectedly and unpretentiously
creative. As a result there is an ease and certainty of
purpose to this concerto, which is beautifully played by
Wu Man – some will have heard some of her other collaborations
with, inter alia, Kronos Quartet and Yuri Bashmet.
The concerto – which is perhaps better described as a suite
than as a concerto if one insists on using western terminology – is
various in mood and a thing of considerable beauty. In
four movements - though one of them consists of four more
or less distinct sections - the opening allegro balances
eastern and western formality in a dialogue that has dignity
and substance, while the fertility of Harrison’s eclectic
imagination is evident in much of what follows. In ‘Troika’ the
pipa sounds almost like a balalaika and in the brief ‘Neapolitan’ there
are, perhaps unsurprisingly, but quite delightfully, echoes
of the Italian mandolin tradition. In ‘Three Sharing’ the
orchestra drops out and we are treated to a percussive
conversation between the pipa of Wu Man, the cello of John
Sharp and the double bass of Joseph Guastafeste. The most
conventionally oriental episode comes in ‘Wind and Plum’,
where the pipa’s cadences, against a lush orchestral background,
are incisive and evocative. The penultimate movement is
a lament, a ‘Threnody for Richard Locke’, a five minute
elegy, powerfully melodic and exquisitely grave. By contrast
the ‘concerto ends with an ‘Estampie’, in which medieval
and renaissance dance rhythms meet (very fruitfully) the
sounds of one of the lute’s ancestors. This whole concerto – the
last of Harrison’s large-scale works – is the high spot
of this disc.
In ‘Legend
of Herlen’ the Mongolian composer Byambasuren Sharav draws
on both native Mongolian traditions and instruments and
on Western music. Western brass, in the shape of three
trombones, and percussion - along with a piano - sit alongside
the morin khuur, a two stringed fiddle and the sound of
Khongorzul Ganbaatar, an exponent of the Mongolian tradition
of ‘long song’, full of sustained and richly ornamented
phrases. The results are intriguing and at times very beautiful,
but perhaps most satisfying when Ganbaatar’s voice is accompanied
solely by the morin khuur; the writing for western instruments
is relatively pedestrian and predictable and actually seems
to add very little to the Mongolian essence of the piece.
How
far the Silk Road project has really succeeded – with
anything like consistency – in uniting disparate musical
traditions is a matter for debate. What is surely undeniable
is that all their recordings have, at the very least, been
stimulating, engaging and challenging. This new recording
is no exception.
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