John MAYER (1939–2004)
Violin Concerto No. 2, ‘Sarangi ka Sangit’ (1977-79) [26:42]
Concerto for the Instruments of an Orchestra (1975) [19:39]
Jonathan MAYER (b. 1975)
Sitar Concerto No. 2 (2019) [24:48]
Pranam (2019) [10:26]
Sasha Rozhdestvensky (violin)
Jonathan Mayer (sitar, tampura)
Shahbaz Hussain (tabla)
BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Debashish Chaudhuri
rec. February 2020, BBC Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff
FIRST HAND RECORDS FHR88 [84:34]
One of the most exciting things about this release is that everything here is heard in a première recording, with the caveat that John Mayer’s Violin Concerto No. 2 has previously been recorded in a non-commercial context.
The Concerto was composed during 1977-79, commissioned by Erich Gruenberg with funds from the RVW Trust and it was Gruenberg who gave the world premiere with the Bournemouth Symphony in October 1979. It’s cast in five movements and as Richard Whitehouse writes in his booklet notes, it explores the relationship between 12-note rows and ragas, and does so in in a seamless, continuous way. Jonathan Mayer plays the tanpura part. The music, as one would expect of the composer of Shanta Quintet for Sitar and Strings as well as his more volatile Indo Jazz Fusions band, strikes a perfect balance between construction and sonority. The 12-note row clearly at one point references Berg’s Violin Concerto but the use of evocative wind writing and beautiful melodic lines from the soloist ensures that the music unfolds in a state of calmness though subject to classical divisions; the second movement, for example, is essentially a Scherzo, the violin scurrying repeatedly over percussion. The central movement is a cadenza called Raga, during which the outstanding Sasha Rozhdestvensky soliloquizes virtuosically or keeningly over a drone, whilst the succeeding section sees him in dialogue with the winds and a return of those elements of stillness that make this so distinctive a concerto. Textures, sonorities, colours, rhythms and optimum confidence in the handling of space are the markers of this work, and once these are resolved, Mayer unleashes what is in effectively a Rondo finale with bristling bravura, as brilliantly brief – though utterly different from – the finale of Chopin’s Funeral March Sonata. Mayer was himself a fine violinist and his handling of the instrument is wholly idiomatic, the kindling of classical and Indian elements both positive and luminous.
In 1975 he wrote Concerto for the Instruments of an Orchestra to a London Philharmonic Orchestra commission and it was premièred early in 1976 by the orchestra and its conductor, Bernard Haitink. As one would expect of such a commission, it explores instruments singly or in combination and the music has a full complement of colour supported by a tangible rhythmic charge. The first movement admits some fairly tart and bitter-sounding exchanges though there’s a discreet kind of ‘swing’ to the third part of the first movement and quiet gentle gestures in the second movement. Big contrasts are encoded here, and the work ends with a Jhala coda, itself somewhat reminiscent of the Gat that ended the Violin Concerto.
John Mayer’s son Jonathan wrote his Sitar Concerto No.2 in 2019. The soil for this work had been enriched by John Mayer’s own works and by Ravi Shankar’s Concerto for Sitar and Orchestra that Shankar recorded with the London Symphony and André Previn in a famous EMI LP collaboration now reissued in Warner’s Previn box set. Jonathan Mayer is the soloist and like his father before him, he privileges neither the Indian nor the Classical elements but allows both to co-exist in a concertante context. The opening of the three movements draws on three ragas, which each possess different moods, and has great richness of colour and shifting rhythmic patterns that leads eloquently to the central movement. Here the sitar predominates as a true soloistic presence but its allusive, reflective writing is fixed on a seventh-century Persian mode which draws the music at a tangent to the central Indian elements. Mayer displays his exceptional technical skill here as he intones and drives over a more becalmed orchestral tapestry. I happen to find the finale oddly filmic – perhaps I am hallucinating when I hear elements that seem to fuse Indian soundtracks with Elmer Bernstein and Morricone, but there is an unambiguously playful element at work too, as the music flows floridly and fulsomely.
The other work by Mayer fils is Pranam, for sitar, the tabla of Shahbaz Hussain and orchestra. Inspired by the Indian dance form called the Kathak it embodies processes of rhythmic cycling and is launched by a long sitar solo. Roughly ten minutes long the piece seems to divide into sections in which solo virtuosity leads to an expansion of sonic breadth, colour and dance potency – very alluring commentaries from the winds in particular – before the tabla really comes into its own in a final section notable for its zest and energy.
The BBC National Orchestra of Wales plays with great commitment in a fine Hoddinott Hall recording. Having listened to some brief rehearsal snippets from the Shankar-Previn sessions it’s notable how important and difficult to mail are certain elements in works of this kind. It’s doubly important to have a conductor fully conversant with the twin poles at work and in Debashish Chaudhuri we have precisely the right man, a resident conductor of the Western repertoire in the Czech Republic and a passionate explorer of Indian and Asian music. I suspect the three recording days in February 2020 were spent melding the sweep of the music with particular questions of accenting, rhythm and phrasing.
If you like, you can call John Mayer’s music ‘fusion’ but to me it’s simply ‘Mayer’ – distinctive, personal, and deeply attractive. His son continues the lineage in his own brace of works and does so with a similar sensibility.
Jonathan Woolf
