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Though he is Canadian-born
Yehudi Wyner grew up in New York, studied
at Juilliard and later at Yale with
Piston and with Hindemith. Winner of
the Rome Prize for Composition in 1953
he spent three years in that city and
has since pursued a distinguished career
as performer, composer and teacher.
He’s currently at Brandeis University
and is a visiting professor at Harvard.
This disc reflects many of the collegiate
associations he has built up – members
of the Lydian Quartet, resident at Brandeis,
take a formidable share of the responsibilities
here as do soprano Dominique Labelle
(associated with the Lydians amongst
numerous others) and well-known oboist
Peggy Pearson, who proposed the idea
of an Oboe Quartet to Wyner.
All three works are
recent. The Second Madrigal: Voices
of Women takes poems anthologised
in A Book of Luminous Things edited
by the distinguished poet Czeslaw Milosz.
Wyner selected ten poems, mainly translations
from Chinese, Sanskrit or Polish texts,
and they are laid out in such a way
as to suggest a kind of narrative. All
concern women in some essential way
– they were all written by or about
women - and the cycle evolves from a
group on the theme of morning through
love, ageing and death. Written with
a strong ensemble to provide a shifting
and complex instrumental patina behind
Labelle’s soprano (for whom Wyner wrote
the cycle) there is a sense of evolution
and exploration throughout the set.
Starting with the whispered intimacies
of Getting Up In Winter and the saucy-jaunty
bassoon rich sonority of In The Morning
the short but well characterised pieces
impress. Sometimes the tessitura causes
real demands – as in the third of the
cycle, Morning where Labelle’s diction
suffers because of it – but the technical
demands exist in parallel with the expressive
ones. Thus she communicates the soaring
urgency of sexual love in When He Pressed
His Lips, with real drama. Confronted
with the bizarre poem that gives the
work its title, The Second Madrigal,
a setting by Anna Swir (1909-1984) and
translated into English by Milosz and
Leonard Nathan and we can hear little
instrumental intimacies (such as the
scurrying violin introduction) that
colour the setting – it does after all
take some derring-do to set the lines
Healthy as a/buttock of a little
angel with a straight face.
I greatly admired the
fanfare like opening of Thank You, My
Fate, the sixth of the cycle, and the
internalised monologue of Cosmetics
Do No Good – Marschallin like in its
self-perception. Wyner certainly doesn’t
shy away from musico-pictorial elements
such as the scurrying wind in The Greatest
Love (ambiguity transfusing into this
setting) or strongly accented words
in a phrase or the wild onrush of the
last of the ten settings, a meditation
on death and dying. Compositionally
Wyner sounds very much his own man;
perceptive, colouristically acute, a
fine setter of words.
The Oboe Quartet opens
with the strange pizzicato tread of
the cello before the lyrical oboe enters.
This is a work that brims with a sense
of constant flux, motion and fusion
where austere meditations, in which
the light violin and viola curl and
coil above the brooding cello, co-exist
with a perky allegretto section full
of drive. Here the insouciance of one
instrument is marked by the seemingly
oblivious direction of another. The
moods coalesce and drift apart again
and the narrative flows with great intimacy
and purpose. When the three strings
conjoin in a communing melancholy it’s
noticeable how the oboe winds gently
above them or how the mordancy of the
little pizzicato-inspired incidents
are conveyed with almost vocalised relish.
It’s entirely appropriate then that
the work seems to end on a note of elliptical
detachment.
The Horntrio – Wyner’s
Germanic compound not mine - is made
of much tougher stuff than the companion
works. Its modernism is announced immediately
with insistent blaring horn and scurrying
violin. Against that there is plenty
of opportunity for sonority – for pellucid
piano, veiled fiddle and open but wandering
horn passages. In the slow movement
one can admire the introspective lines
of the violin and the way in which the
piano – here played by the composer
– explores the harmonies with such clarity
and coherence. The finale is resinous
and driving; Wyner adds in his notes
that he can point out fragments of popular
tunes in the work (Lazybones, Gershwin’s
Who Cares and even Chattanooga Choo
Choo but don’t think this is a faux
naïve tapestry of quotations. If
they’re there – and one must take the
composer’s word for it – you’ll have
to listen hard to grasp their essence.
The work ends with explosively crashing
finality.
The performances are
truly eloquent and Bridge’s production
values are high, from the excellent
booklet notes – words from Wyner and
Martin Brody – to the full-bodied recording
quality. Wyner’s is an imaginative voice
in contemporary American composition
and this is a fine slice of his creativity.
Jonathan Woolf
Dominique Labelle (soprano), Daniel Steppner
(violin), Judith Eissenberg (violin), Mary Ruth
Ray (viola), Rafael Popper-Keizer (cello), Carolyn
Davis Fryer (bass), Susan Gall (flute), Peggy
Pearson (oboe), Katherine Matasy (clarinet), Janet
Underhill (bassoon), Jean Rife (horn), Robert
Schulz (percussion), Yehudi Wyner (conductor)
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