Benjamin LEES (1924-2010)
String Quartet No.1 (1952) [16:29]
String Quartet No.5 (2002) [26:00]
String Quartet No.6 (2005) [19:55]
Cypress String Quartet (Cecily Ward (violin), Tom Stone (violin), Ethan Filner
(viola), Jennifer Kloetzel (cello))
rec. Skywalker Sound, Marin County, California, November 2002 (Quartet 5),
May 2003 (Quartet 1), December 2005 (Quartet 6).
NAXOS 8.559628 [62:23]
I sat down to type up this review late on the evening of Tuesday 1 June 2010.
Halfway through doing so, wanting to check a date, I went to the web site
devoted to Benjamin Lees (www.benjaminlees.com/),
where I was faced with the following announcement: “IT IS WITH PROFOUND
SADNESS THAT THE FAMILY ANNOUNCES THE PASSING OF COMPOSER BENJAMIN LEES ON
MAY 31, 2010”. This review - written on the day after the composer’s
death - necessarily becomes more of a memorial than I intended it to be when
I sat down to put it together.
Lees was born in China, brought up and educated in California. From 1949 to
1954 he studied with George Antheil who acted as a largely unpaid tutor out
of respect for Lees’ abilities. From the mid-1950s onwards his works
began to be performed quite widely and by distinguished performers, without
his ever perhaps becoming a ‘major’ figure in American music.
A Guggenheim fellowship enabled him to spend much of his time in Europe in
the second half of the 1950s. Never a composer who aspired to be thought of
as especially ‘American’, these European years were important
for Lees, years when he could evolve his own voice without direct involvement
in the style wars of American music. Prokofiev, Bartók and Shostakovich
became important exemplars for Lees.
In a 1987 interview with
Bruce Duffie, when the interviewer enquired “in a great number of your
own works, you have used the traditional approach - Slonimsky calls it accessibility
- which makes your music attractive to conductors and soloists. Is this
something you have consciously built in to your pieces, or is this an outgrowth
of what you wanted to write innately?”, Lees answered as follows: “The
accessibility, I suppose, comes from something that George Antheil told me
when I was studying with him. He put it very succinctly, and it was
one of those catch words which stuck in the memory. He said, “Music
must have a face. A theme must have a face, something which is really
recognizable, both to you and to the listener.” And again, it
matters not what style a person writes in, but it cannot simply be amorphous.
It cannot be really formless and it cannot be merely notes spinning”.
Certainly Lees’ music never seeks to exclude listeners, or to make their
life needlessly difficult by the flaunting of the composer’s ‘cleverness’.
Nor, on the other hand, does he write down, or write to please some lowest
common denominator of taste and demand. Like any substantial composer, Lees
seems always to have been true to himself, to have been serenely unworried,
so far as one can judge, by matters of mere fashion or popularity. Honesty,
indeed, has always struck me as one of the hallmarks of his work, a directness
of communication. It seems appropriate that he should once have said that
“there are two kinds of composers. One is the intellectual and the other
is visceral. I fall into the latter category. If my stomach doesn’t
tighten at an idea, then it’s not the right idea.”
Most attention - and perhaps rightly so - has been paid to Lees’ orchestral
works, not least his five symphonies. But, as this disc demonstrates well
and clearly, he also had plenty to say in that other ‘classical’
form - the string quartet, of which he wrote six. This rewarding Naxos disc
contains three of them in fine performances by the Cypress Quartet, for whom
the fifth and the sixth were written.
The Cypress Quartet begin their programme with Lees’ first quartet,
written in 1952, and premiered the following year in Los Angles - and in 1954
played in New York by the Budapest Quartet. In three movements (moderato-adagietto-allegro
vivo) it has an appealing grace, at its most obvious in the adagietto, a lovely
moment that exudes a simplicity - created by considerable art - and only slightly
troubled lyricism that has a more or less pastoral quality. In the movement
that precedes it some crisp and dynamic writing alternates with more reflective
passages. In the last movement - essentially a rondo - the writing is engagingly
animated, seeming to speak out of a mind full of ideas and eagerness. A quartet
well worth hearing - especially when so well performed - but not yet fully
embodying the composer’s mature voice.
The two ‘late’ quartets give us that voice in abundance. The four
movements of the fifth quartet (measured - arioso - quick, quiet - explosive)
form a musical argument of considerable density, marked both by striking moments
and a sense of larger design. The writing for cello at the opening of the
first movement, and the ensuing dialogue with the other instruments is one
of those striking moments. Another comes in the second movement when an aggressive
intervention by the cello disrupts the meditative conversation of the two
violins. The more one listens, the more such moments one discovers. The third
movement is a miniature delight (it lasts less than two minutes), music of
evanescent beauty. The contrast with the fourth movement could hardly be more
marked - full as it is of musical contention and turbulence, of assertion
and annoyed counter-assertion, a conflict not so much resolved as serving
to fuel a still angry ending.
Where the sixth quartet is concerned the composer’s markings for its
four movements say most of what the mere reviewer might want to say about
the work: “measured, dolorous - calm, steady - quiet, eerie - unhurried”.
And they are! The use pizzicato passages is a particular feature of this quartet
- notably at moments in the first and third movements. Without any wilful
oddity or eccentricity, Lees creates some fresh and interesting effects at
more than one point in this quartet. To say that one can ‘hear’
his respect for Bartók and Shostakovich is not, repeat not, to belittle
his work as derivative. It is merely to recognise that, like 99% (or more!)
of all artists, Lees was not a toweringly inventive figure. He was a highly
accomplished craftsman who had listened to, and learned from, the music of
the past and the present; a composer who refused to be merely modish or to
chase the fashionable at the cost of fidelity to what he felt to be
right for him.
It is, I hope, timely to celebrate Lees’ achievement, immediately after
his death. Not a composer of spectacular fame, he worked with a seriousness
and truth that some more famous fall short of.
Glyn Pursglove
Other Lees reviews on MWI
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classRev/2003/Sept03/American_Concertos.htm
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2008/Sept08/Bloch_Lees_ar00422.htm
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2008/July08/Bloch_Lees_ar00422.htm
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2000/jan00/lees.htm
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2000/mar00/lees.htm
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2008/June08/Lees_TOCC0069.htm
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2003/Aug03/lees_symphonies.htm
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2003/Sept03/Lees_Balada_Zwilich.htm
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2003/Sept03/Lees_Hobson.htm
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2003/Sept03/bishop_shawn.htm