Robert ERICKSON (1917-1997)
Night Music (1978) [19:21]
Fantasy for Cello and Orchestra (1954)* [14:23]
East of the Beach (1980) [13:34]
Auroras (1982 rev. 1985) [22:20]
Rose Popper-Keizer (cello)*
Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose
rec. 21-22 February 2008, Mechanics Hall, Worcester, Massachusetts.
NEW WORLD RECORDS 80682-2 [69:58]
Robert Erickson’s discography now includes his complete String
Quartets and two fine discs of orchestral and ensemble music. The
booklet notes describe a maverick career with a wide diversity of activities
in the music world, though always with composition as its central element.
Night Music develops around well-defined melodic solos and duos
of instruments, the material intertwining around held tones or emerging
from ‘darkness’ with bravura flourishes, becoming an organic
whole while retaining improvisatory independence. The sound is defined
by an amplified trumpet which often leads the musical material, the colour
of the ensemble also given an exotic flavour through percussion and gamelan-like
sounds which link to sparingly used microtones. The music has at times
a ritualistic feel, and retains an enigmatic but compelling atmosphere
throughout.
The Fantasy for Cello and Orchestra is considerably earlier,
and represents a time in which Erickson was breaking away from more academic
models. It was written not long after he arrived in San Francisco from
his birthplace of Michigan, and for its period is strikingly romantic
and expressionistic – certainly going against the avant-garde trends
of the time. Techniques used in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music appear
but this is by no means a serialist work, with plenty of impressive dramatic
fingerprints of an almost cinematic quality and the influence of Alban
Berg in evidence. The intensity of the music comes at least in part as
it responded to the death of one of Erickson’s mentors, Frank Kearney.
The title East of the Beach refers to the composer’s home
north of San Diego, and it shares artistic DNA with Night Music
in its use of drones – tonal centres around which the music develops
and swells. “I was much involved in tone color and rhythm in this
composition”, and the fascination with the drones is that they constantly
shift in instrumentation and timbre. The orchestration is often stunningly
luminous, the tonality and melodic lines embracing the sweep of Sibelius’s
symphonic writing and at times emerging in swathes of aurora like patterns.
This brings us to the final work Auroras, which saw the composer
engaging with health issues and thoughts of his own mortality. This saw
its origins in birdsong encountered while on a lecture visit in California.
“I hadn’t heard birds against such silent backgrounds since
I was a boy, and perhaps that was the trigger… [making] a ball
of feeling in my belly that was the whole non-verbal source of the whole
musical action of Auroras”. Erickson doesn’t take
on birdsong in the way you might expect from someone like Messiaen, and
the sense of nature is indeed more like that you could experience from
Sibelius, with wider landscapes and a feeling of vastness. It is “expressive
music - music of feeling”, and truly beautiful at times –
elsewhere with passages of dark drama, perhaps contrasting life with the
struggle for existence.
Superbly performed and recorded, this is an impressive release from New
World Records. Erickson’s later music has an understated, at times
introvert and thoughtful aspect which invites contemplation, though this
is more an invitation to join his vision of wide and powerful themes than
anything new-age and artificially spiritual. If you are intrigued by new
music but want to explore sonorities which sidestep avant-garde ‘isms’
then Robert Erickson may well be the man for you.
Dominy Clements
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