As
part of their successful 'American Classics Series' Naxos turn their
attention to the string chamber music of Roger Sessions. These
recordings were issued previously on the Koch International
Classics label in 1993 and also I believe in 1997.
The stature of
Roger Sessions among modern American composers is unquestioned;
especially as a teacher. The catalogue of his 42 compositions
includes nine symphonies written between 1927 to 1978, three
concertos, two operas, a cantata and works in other large formats,
as well as chamber music and solo piano works. Of Sessions’
chamber music four scores are represented here, the exception
being the Second String Quartet (1951), Duo for Violin and Piano
(1942), Sonata for Solo Violin (1953) and an incomplete first
movement from the Duo for Violin and Violoncello (1981).
New
York City-born Sessions won every major award, including a Pulitzer
Prize. Although he composed for three-quarters of a century,
from 1910 to 1985, his most productive period came after the
age of 60. The String Quintet, the Six Cello Pieces and Canons
for String Quartet all date from this late period. His careers
as composer and teacher were paralleled by a third, that of
writer about music. A highly literate man, Sessions published
four books and over forty articles. These include his Norton
lectures at Harvard University (Questions
about Music), his harmony textbook, Harmonic Practice,
and his valuable work The Musical Experience as Composer,
Performer, Listener. His essays, edited by Edward T. Cone,
are published as Roger Sessions on Music: Collected
Essays and his letters, edited by Andrea Olmstead, appear
as The Correspondence of Roger Sessions.
The
influences of Stravinsky and Bloch, and later of Dallapiccola
and Schoenberg, are found in his music, but these voices are
used for distinctly personal ends. Certain identifying features
characterise the style. One is the much-discussed "long
line". Sessions’ long phrases arch gracefully and participate
in a highly complex contrapuntal texture. Another characteristic
is rhythmic flexibility achieved by frequent shifts of time
signature and the use of polyrhythms.
These
characteristics are employed in the twelve-tone String Quintet,
commissioned by the Music Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Sessions’ love for Mozart’s Quintets in G minor and
C major and Schubert’s Quintet in C major, "tempted
as a stimulus and challenge to adopt this medium for the new
work". The première of the String Quintet took place
in 1958 in Berkeley with the eminent Griller Quartet, who performed
only the first two movements, as the composer had not completed
the score in time. Through the generosity of Paul Fromm the
complete String Quintet was given its première in November 1959,
in New York by the
Lenox Quartet.
Formally,
the first movement Movimento tranquillo resembles the
first movement of the String Quartet in E minor in that, it
too, is modelled on Beethoven's A minor Quartet, with three
expositions. The second movement Adagio ed espressivo is
aria-like and the third and concluding one marked Allegro
appassionato is a sonata allegro.
In
1971 the editors of Boosey & Hawkes’ periodical Tempo
asked distinguished composers to contribute Canons for
a 1972 issue dedicated to the memory of Igor Stravinsky, who
had died in April 1971. Stravinsky had written of Sessions in
1963, "Roger Sessions is one of the people I most admire
and respect: as composer, scholar, teacher, intellect.
But last and most, he is a dear friend." Sessions wrote
the brief Canons for muted string quartet in August 1971,
aboard a ship bound for Oslo. The inscription
at the end of the manuscript reads, "On the high seas."
Still
in his "neo-Classical" tonal stage, Sessions wrote
the String Quartet No. 1 in E minor. Sessions penned the score
whilst staying in the summer of 1936 at a ranch near Reno in Nevada, in order to establish residency to obtain a divorce
from his first wife and to marry a former student. The score
was commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and given its
première by the Coolidge Quartet at Coolidge’s Eighth Festival
of Chamber Music, in April 1937, in Washington D.C. The young
Elliott Carter wrote in ‘Modern Music’ of, "a new and
important quartet by Roger Sessions. Though no single theme
is outstanding (as is often the case with Beethoven) every detail,
the cadences, the way the themes are brought in, the texture,
the flexibility of the bass, were such as to give constant delight,
and at times to be genuinely moving. His sense of a large line
gave the music a certain roominess without ever being over expansive."
The
Viennese composer Ernst Krenek wrote to Sessions (7
March 1939) of the String
Quartet, "I like especially the originality of the harmonic
features which give clear evidence of a very personal and deep
expressiveness of your music. Furthermore, I was very much impressed
by the long breath of some thematic developments, especially
in the first movement."
In
a programme note for a performance by the Gordon String Group
in January 1941, Sessions stated that he was influenced by Beethoven’s
String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, in the formal structure
of the work. Marked Tempo moderato the first movement
of Sessions’s first String Quartet is a triple exposition, three
"stanzas". Each stanza contains three themes
which are varied at their return. A specific tempo grants each
of the three themes part of its identity. The effect is one
of a huge stretto. The second movement Adagio molto
begins with an Adagio and is continued by a brief
scherzando interlude that leads back to the Adagio.
About writing the central movement Sessions remarked that, "It
seemed to me that I was writing like Alban Berg already."
The third movement Vivace molto, a sonata-allegro
form, was Sessions’ strictest form to date. The introduction
is followed by the first theme in the viola and the second theme
appears in the cello. Sessions commented, "The last
movement is probably the most orthodox movement I ever wrote.
But it's a lot of fun. To me it brings back the smell of sagebrush
and the lovely place out in the country where I lived in Nevada. I
rode horseback!"
A
swift check has shown that for these works the Group for Contemporary
Music currently seem to have the market to themselves. From
their foundation in 1962 until 1971 the Group for Contemporary
Music was in residence at the Columbia University in
the City of New York, followed by a residency at the Manhattan School of
Music until 1985. The Group performs throughout with a splendid
security of ensemble in performances that abound in character
and precision. I especially enjoyed their vitality and convincing
sense of forward momentum in the concluding movement Allegro
appassionato of the String Quintet and their warm and tender
interpretation of the lengthy Adagio molto movement of
the first String Quartet is first class.
A
few years later Sessions completed the Six Pieces for Solo Cello
between writing his Symphony No. 6 (1966) and Symphony No. 7
(1967). The Six Pieces for Solo Cello were written for and dedicated
to Sessions’ son John, a cellist. The score had its première
at an all-Sessions concert held by the International Society
for Contemporary Music, in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill
Hall), in New York, in March 1968. As in Sessions’ Double
Concerto (1971), where two instruments converse with one
another, a conversation can be imagined here too, in the contrasting
and recitative-like passages given to the solo instrument. The
participants in the second movement, Dialogue, Sessions
and his son, neither argue nor question and answer one another;
it is a friendly conversation. The fourth movement, Berceuse,
had definite familial associations for Sessions as well. After
his granddaughter (John’s daughter, Teresa) was born he saw
her lying in her crib and immediately thought of the opening
four bars of the music.
The cellist Joshua
Gordon carries the score’s lyrical message with intensity and
accomplishment, assisted by the recording that gives the cello
a realistic presence. There have been several recordings of
Sessions’ Six Pieces for Cello in recent years and the ones
most likely to be encountered are those from Matt Haimovitz
on his 1995 release entitled ‘The 20th-Century Cello’ Vol. 1
on Deutsche Grammophon 4458342 and also from Pieter Wispelwey
on his 2001 disc of ‘20th-Century Solo Cello Works’ on Channel
Classics CCS7495.
The
Koch International Classics engineers have provided a clear
and well balanced sound quality and the liner notes from Andrea
Olmstead are exemplary. The chamber music of Roger Sessions
is well served by this splendid Naxos release.
Michael
Cookson
see
also Review
by Jonathan Woolf
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The Group for Contemporary Music (Benjamin Hudson, violin; Carol Zeavin,
violin; Lois Martin, viola; Joshua Gordon, cello; Jenny Douglass, viola
(Quintet))
