Concertos for Mallet Instruments
Alex ALRICH (b.1955)
Marimba Concerto (2004) [32:57)
Karl JENKINS (b.1944)
La Folia (2004) [11:15]
Ned ROREM (b.1923)
Mallet Concerto (2003) [26:33]
Dame Evelyn Glennie (percussion)
City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong/Jean Thorel
rec. 29 May-June 1, 2013, Shaw Studios, Hong Kong.
Premiere recordings (Alrich & Rorem)
NAXOS 8.574218 [71:01]
I wonder why this disc – recorded in 2013 – has had to wait eight years to be released?
It would, I think, be fair to say that of the three composers represented on this disc, Alexis Alrich is the least widely known. Her musical career has followed an interesting trajectory. She studied composition at the New England Conservatory and the California Institute of the Arts, before taking a Master’s degree with the late Lou Harrison at Mills College in Oakland, California. The move to California, and the example of Harrison seem to have effected a major shift in Alrich’s musical aesthetic, as illustrated by two statements on her website in one of which she says that her early music was “complex and almost unplayable” but her later work is “more personal, more practical and accessible” and in the other that her “music tries to capture the fleeting emotions of life, the wonder of nature, and the joy of sound”.
This Marimba Concerto and some of the other pieces by Alrich which I have heard on YouTube and Spotify suggest that a number of the hallmarks of Harrison’s work have been carried across into her work – such as the giving of greater priority to melody and rhythm than to harmony, the extensive use of percussion, the integration of diverse influences, including Asian music (Harrison introduced her to gamelan). After Alrich had completed her studies with Harrison she continued to live in the area of San Francisco Bay, and taught at the San Francisco Conservatory. From 2007-2011 she was the first director of the ‘John Adams Young Composers Program’ in Hong Kong and Berkeley. Since 2017 she has lived in the city of Grass Valley in Nevada County, California. She has hosted a radio programme, ‘Classics Declassified’ on KVMR, Nevada City.
Alrich’s Marimba Concerto is in three movements (Con moto – Lento – energico). As implied in my discussion of Alrich’s music above, the concerto draws on a number of different traditions and influences. In the first movement, for example, a set of variations incorporates a waltz of almost Viennese charm, in which the soloist is accompanied on the harp. In the second movement one passage draws on Latin-American (probably Mexican) folk music and in the closing ‘energico’ there are clear Asian influences. Some of the rhythmic patterns owe something to the example of American minimalism. At various points in the work there are a number of cadenzas for the soloist. There is an especially striking toccata-like one in the third movement – I am not clear whether these are all fully written (though I suspect they are) or whether the soloist has some discretion and freedom in these sections. This is not a work ever likely to bore the listener, being full, as it is, of frequent changes of rhythm and idiom. But I always felt that everything was part of a coherent vision on the part of the composer. There is diversity within unity here. That phrase of Alrich’s quoted earlier “the joy of sound” is very relevant. Textures of instrumental colour in the orchestra and the sound palette of the marimba become fascinations in themselves (for both composer and listener).
Karl Jenkins’ La Folia, for marimba and strings won’t, I suspect, achieve the considerable commercial success of Jenkins’ mass The Armed Man (1999), but there are analogies between the two. Each is based on a survival from a much earlier period; in the case of the mass, the late medieval song ‘L’homme armé’, in that of La Folia, the dance pattern of that name, in triple meter, of which an early version was known in the 1400s, but which became more frequently imitated after it had been ‘regularised’ by Lully in the 1670s. In both of these works Jenkins has to face comparisons with distinguished predecessors. Masses based on ‘L’homme armé’ were written, for example, by Johannes Regis, Josquin, Pierre de la Rue, Christobal de Morales and Palestrina and (nearer in time to Jenkins) by Peter Maxwell Davies, while ‘La Folia’ has been re-presented by, amongst very many others, Corelli, C.P.E. Bach, Handel, Alkan, Rachmaninov and Henze. I have to say that although Jenkins’ variations are pleasant enough listening, the work doesn’t deserve an especially high place in the huge catalogue of responses to ‘La Folia’. Having listened to Jenkins’ La Folia several times for the purposes of this review, I am not sure that I shall rush to hear it again in the near future.
There is more substance and more persuasive invention to be found in Ned Rorem’s Mallet Concerto, written at the age of 80 (if I have got my maths correct). The score of this work is published by Boosey & Hawkes and their website carries some observations by the composer:
“The older I get, the simpler I get ... After years of garnishing my
orchestral works with every type of gong and drum, I’ve concluded that
non-pitched percussion is superfluous, even in Beethoven. I am morally against
all cymbal crashes, and feel that snares and bongos are strictly ornamental
... But Evelyn Glennie is too grand a performer to refuse. We agreed that
‘our’ concerto would feature only pitched instruments for the soloist and no
percussion at all in the orchestra. Thus, in each of the seven movements
Evelyn plays a different mallet instrument (glockenspiel, marimba, xylophone,
chimes) stressing chords and tune, but never rhythm for its own sake ...
The four elements of music are melody, harmony, counterpoint, and rhythm. Rhythm is the most dispensable.”
Leaving aside the larger points made by Rorem (always fond of stirring up some controversy, as readers of his diaries will know), a key statement here, with particular reference to the concerto itself, is made when Rorem writes “in each of the seven movements Evelyn plays a different mallet instrument (glockenspiel, marimba, xylophone, chimes) stressing chords and tune, but never rhythm for its own sake.” The seven movements making up the concerto carry titles which are in some cases directly functional (‘I. ‘A Beginning’; VII. ‘An Ending’), in some cases descriptive of the way the music works (III. ‘Back and Forth’, IV. ‘A Xylo-Waltz’, VI. ‘Tag’, ) and in some cases ‘poetical’ (II. ‘Another Minotaur’, V. ‘Let Me In’). In terms of Rorem’s use of different solo instruments, the seven movements form a kind of palindromic arch, the sequence being vibraphone (I), glockenspiel (II), marimba (III), xylophone (IV), marimba (V), glockenspiel (VI), vibraphone or chimes (VII). If the soloist chooses (as Dame Evelyn does) to use the vibraphone rather than the chimes in the last movement, the palindromic sequence is neatly completed. One obvious strength of Rorem’s work is the opportunity it affords the soloist to articulate the different qualities of the different instruments – these distinctive possibilities being well recognized in Rorem’s writing and (unsurprisingly) in Ms. Glennie’s playing. Across the seven short movements (the longest comes in at 5:24, the briefest at 2:12), there are reflective passages and lyrical passages (so many, indeed, that one is tempted, at times, to forget that this a percussion concerto). There are a number of passages – not least in the third movement, ‘Back and Forth’, when one is reminded of Rorem the composer of songs. Still, he seems genuinely fascinated by the different resonances of the percussion instruments used, but his gift for the lyrical is never far away. The result has an elegance and thoughtfulness not commonly found in percussion concertos. The work has little of that banging and clattering which one takes away as the abiding memory of inferior percussion concertos; it has, rather, the lyricism and subtlety of mind that one associates with Rorem, one of the modern masters of song. This is a percussion concerto by a composer who tells us (see above) “I am morally against all cymbal crashes, and feel that snares and bongos are strictly ornamental.”
The Rorem is, I think, the finest work here – and I suspect that it will be the most enduring- but the other pieces have their rewards; I find the mixture of idioms in Alrich’s Marimba Concerto especially attractive.
Glyn Pursglove
