Barati's music sounds typically 1960s modernist. Textures
are masterly. Dissonance is employed. If you take the thornier moments
from Malcolm Arnold's Seventh and Ninth symphonies and imagine them
without the communicative lyricism then you have a fair approximation
of Barati. Similar parallels can be found with Humphrey Searle. His
countryman, Bartók, might well be seen as a point of departure
for this music although Barati is far far tougher. He must have imbibed
deeply of Roger Sessions' symphonies. The music of Sessions (with whom
he studied) is denser than Barati's but Barati just as uninhibitedly
ploughs his own furrow with no feints towards accessibility. In the
symphony a wispy melancholy appears in the andantino tranquillo although
this music is not tranquil. Barati deals in mood and atmospherics in
the outer movements and they certainly ripple with incident but symphonic
direction is not obvious.
The two Chants date from thirty years after
the symphony. While the symphony is something of a 1960s museum piece
the Chants seem to have more to say. Both were prompted by the
devastating death through breast cancer of his daughter Lorna at the
age of 39. That was in 1992. The Chants have the bearing of 19th
century tone poems (and the titles could easily have been those of unknown
works by Glazunov) though the idiom is determinedly 20th century. The
constructional 'bricks' include tiny cells, instrumental lucidity, an
aversion from tunes (though one of some nobility emerges at 11.37 in
Chant of Light), clarity, pecking activity, clattering and tinkling
percussion. If Chant of Light is designed to provide a foil to
Chant of Darkness (the latter written in the immediacy of bereavement)
then the light is aspired to through darkness. Those realms are further
recreated through the Chant of Darkness which was written, contrary
to his usual method, straight into full score. The slow-motion 'lightning
strikes' (11.30) of the massed violins add a protesting voice to the
nerveless propulsion through a kingdom Barati had no wish to explore
but through which he was impelled by grief and anger.
Paul Horsley contributes truly valuable notes and,
unlike the Naxos Barber English-only series, are also in German, Spanish
and French. Mr Horsley reminds us that Barati was one of many Hungarians
who have contributed to world, and especially US, culture with
a value and éclat out of all proportion to his birth-country's
minuscule population (only 10 million people). Barati fled his homeland
during the 1930s having studied with Leo Weiner and with Kodaly. He
studied in the States with Sessions at Princeton and became a US citizen
in 1944. He played cello under Monteux at the San Francisco Symphony,
then from 1950 to 1968 was principal conductor of the Honolulu S.O.
He died in 1996 following a still unsolved street crime in Los Gatos
where he was struck severely on the head. He died 11 days later. His
wife, Ruth, whose effort and support brought this recording into existence,
died in 1999.
The orchestras are never less than good and the acoustics
allow every detail to register. By a small edge the superior tracks
are those from the Czech orchestra and Válek; these are also
the more impressive works.
Barati is here the unrepentant, even proud, exponent
of modernism and his Chant of Darkness stands out as the most
gripping work in this company. It is surely lit by a tragic compulsion
that I did not sense in the other two works.
Rob Barnett
Budapest SO/Lászlo
Kováks (symphony)