Following hot on the heels of Rochberg’s Symphony No.
5, Black Sounds and Transcendental Variations
(8.559115) Naxos have released a recording of two more significant
Rochberg scores as part of their ‘American Classics’ series.
The same forces that were so successful in the earlier release
namely the Saarbrücken orchestra under London-born Christopher
Lyndon-Gee continue to be used and the recording was once again
made in the same studio.
Leading American composer George Rochberg was the son of
a Ukrainian Jewish family who emigrated to the USA just prior
to the outbreak of the ‘Great’ war. Rochberg forms part of that
remarkable and important generation of Eastern European emigrants
and their children, including; Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein,
George and Ira Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein and Irving Berlin.
These people significantly contributed to propelling American
music into the forefront of international artistic sophistication
and significance. Sadly Rochberg died earlier this year at his
Philadelphia home, aged eighty-six.
After serving as a Captain for the US forces in Europe
in the Second World War, Rochberg was seriously wounded during
the ‘Battle of the Bulge’, in the Ardennes Forest on the German/Belgium
border in the winter of 1944-45. Later in Italy, Rochberg became
friends of the anti-Fascist composer Luigi Dallapiccola, then
the leader of the Italian ‘serialist’ avant-garde group. Through
the influence of Dallapiccola and private study of the works
of Schoenberg and Webern, he became convinced of the “inevitability”
of twelve-tone composition, and began writing his first serial
compositions. He later wrote of this period that he felt himself,
“living at the very edge of the musical frontier, of music
itself.” Upon returning to America, Rochberg published the
first American study of twelve-tone music.
The Symphony No. 2 is a fully-fledged twelve-tone
work; the first in fact to be composed by an American. It made
Rochberg’s name at its New York première in 1961 at Carnegie
Hall, with a performance given by the Cleveland Orchestra under
George Szell. Rochberg came to describe his highly personal
mode of expression in this new compositional language as, “hard
romanticism.” Rochberg said of his Symphony that
its formal style is, “essentially four movements linked by
brief interludes into a thirty-minute uninterrupted musical
whole.” The conductor here has described the work as having,
“a helter-skelter, gritty, impassioned language.” Listening
now to Rochberg’s Symphony No. 2 is not quite the experience
fraught with unsettling difficulties that it might have been
some decades ago. It is very much of its time and although not
an easy listening experience the challenges seem far more manageable
and the music is reasonably approachable.
The score to the Second Symphony opens with a movement
called Declamando, that has a distinct military feel
of field-musicians using snare drums, bugles and other brass
fanfares. The contribution of the woodwinds includes piercing
flute calls. Episodes of calm are infused into the score but
a mood of tension and agitation predominates. The atmosphere
changes to one of jollity before moving into angst and darkness.
Initially in the second movement, Allegro scherzoso it
is hard to differentiate between what has gone before. The music
develops into a harsher and craggier version of the opening
movement. The extended third movement Adagio opens in
an climate of tranquillity. Suggestions of searching and yearning
prevail. Then what sound like Far-Eastern elements are evoked
with a passage for solo violin and various woodwind. The relative
calmness comes to an end with an unexpected forte episode
for full orchestra which is not sustained; a device that Rochberg
replicates. The fourth movement, Quasi tempo primo is
perhaps the most interesting of the whole Symphony. The
high tension tempo is maintained throughout the various sections
of the orchestra in which each seems to be competing for attention.
The brief final movement Coda is a moody and tense affair
with an almost threatening atmosphere to bring the Symphony
to its conclusion. The performers here make very convincing
advocates for the virtues of this score. The performance is
of the highest order with powerful and cleanly textured playing.
Following a gradual reassessment of his aesthetic, Rochberg
turned his back on ‘serial music’ and ultimately returned to
the composition of tonal music between the nineteen-sixties
and nineteen-eighties. In 1961 the Rochbergs’ seventeen-year-old
son, Paul, fell ill with a brain tumour. He died three years
later, throwing his father into despair. Confronted with his
son’s death, Rochberg struggled to give that tragedy some meaning
through his music, but the serialism upon which his career had
been built he now found empty and meaningless. It was a language
that could not bear the weight of his sorrow and he abandoned
it. Rochberg declared of serialism, “It was finished, hollow,
meaningless.” In the next decade, he maintained his exploration
to find a musical syntax suitable for that sorrow, marking his
struggle in many works.
The orchestral score to Imago Mundi (Image of
the World). can be better described as a ‘Ritual’ than as
a ‘Symphonic Poem’ and provides a stark contrast to the earlier
Second Symphony. It was commissioned by the Baltimore
Symphony Orchestra, and first performed in May 1974 under Sergiu
Comissiona. A three-week visit to Japan in the early summer
of 1973 left Rochberg with profound visual, aural and cultural
impressions. A group of four related works were rapidly written
in subsequent months, three chamber works: Ukiyo-E – Pictures
of the Floating World; Slow Fires of Autumn (Ukiyo-E
II); Between Two Worlds (Ukiyo-E III) and the featured
work for large orchestra Imago Mundi. Christopher Lyndon-Gee
explains that, “Exploration of ways of perceiving and representing
the world is at the heart of this series of works.”
Rochberg explains in his memoirs, entitled ‘Five Lines
and Four Spaces’, that the freer-structured score to Imago
Mundi, “is a picturing of the external world,
but only insofar as our pictures of the world outside ourselves
are imaginings, mental fictions, shadowed reflections of the
‘reality’ of past as well as of present times”. This Naxos
disc provides the world première recording. In parts the score
recalls what has been described as the hypnotic timelessness
of Japanese Gagaku, which is a form of Japanese classical music,
heard at Shinto-shrines, Japanese wedding ceremonies and court
events. In the score I heard reminders of the Gagaku-inspired
sound world of Cowell and Hovhaness. This exploration of rhythm,
harmony and instrumental sonorities and uses exotic woodwind
and percussion. Orchestra and conductor hold the score together
with distinction.
The sound quality is a credit to the Naxos engineers and
the booklet notes maintain the all-round high standard. An excellent
release well worth exploring.
Michael
Cookson
see also Reviews by Rob
Barnett and John
Phillips
Saarbrücken Radio-Symphony Orchestra/Christopher Lyndon-Gee
