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Sunday, September 26, 2004
Review: American Masters, Worlds Apart
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
— Thamyris new-music ensemble, Friday at Emory University’s Carlos Museum.
— Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Saturday at Symphony Hall.
Many American cities have lost what used to be its bustling core, the old downtown. Does contemporary American classical music suffer a similar condition?
Two superbly performed concerts over the weekend showed the outer rings of our new-music landscape — the equivalents to those isolating, self-sufficient “edge cities� of suburbia. The two sound worlds need never communicate with each other, which only reinforces the distance between them.
The music was by award-winning composers: Paul Moravec’s “Tempest Fantasy,� which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for music, played Friday by Thamyris; and Elliott Carter’s “Allegro scorrevole,� which I heard Saturday from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
The 35-minute Moravec, introduced by the composer himself, was the only work on the lunch-hour program. The 11-minute Carter led to two composers of a classicist bent, Beethoven and Brahms.
With due respect to Messrs. Moravec and Carter, the works played here are minor — elevated to lofty cultural prominence by a dearth of alternatives, or by an outmoded hierarchy system, where the top indicator is something other than the time-honored fusion of substance and listening pleasure.
“Tempest Fantasy,� for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, is Moravec’s soft commentary on Shakespeare, with sections devoted to Ariel (sounding airborne and jaunty), Prospero (pensive, ponderous), Caliban (asymmetrical, intense) and Caliban’s “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises� speech. The finale wraps it all together, with a hopeful ending.
Moravec’s craft is excellent, and his use of instruments is unexpectedly witty, where Caliban the cannibal is made flesh by a skulking bass clarinet. For a few brief instances, a listener sensed something was about to happen— the music was going to take off to become greater than its parts — but that something went away just as quickly.
The "Be not afeard"-inspired fourth movement, called “Sweet Airs,� points to one of the work’s more obvious deficiencies. With comforting tonal harmonies and nonthreatening rhythms, he sets us up for a knockout gorgeous violin melody — wonderful, just like they used to do in the 19th century. But Moravec doesn't deliver a tune, and the lyricism seemed faceless, a letdown. Where’s the soul? The individual voice? “Tempest Fantasy� reminded me of those stylish high-end strip malls, which try to capture a historic intown look — some brickwork here, a stubby tower there — while feeling mostly generic.
Moravec’s blandness — like his fellow Neo-Tonalist composers — is likely a counter reaction to Carter’s dissonant, ferociously complex music. At the peak of his reputation, from the 1950s-1970s, Carter was often called “America’s greatest composer.” Composers who didn’t write in Carter’s abstract high-modernist style felt themselves sidelined. Whether anyone knew it at the time, it was the process of gutting the middle of American music. (A few composers, like John Adams, are reclaiming that center ground. It takes a week to clear cut a forest; an eon to return to “old growth” forest.)
At the start of Saturday's ASO concert, conductor Robert Spano helpfully took apart “Allegro scorrevole,� with orchestral examples. When they played it complete, it was a revelation, a work humming with personality and an intriguing story line. Still, for all its surface delicacy and lace-like beauty, "Allegro scorrevole" is thin music that reveals its secrets so reluctantly -- even after many listenings -- that one eventually concludes it doesn't actually have any secrets to share.
After the Carter, the ASO played a cheerful Beethoven Symphony No. 2 and, with Louie Lortie as soloist, Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2, a majestic, autumnal, at times portentious whale of a concerto. The ASO played it like a symphony with piano narration, a role suited to Lortie, a Canadian whose gravitas exceeds his considerable virtuosity.
With both the Carter and the Moravec — using Beethoven and Brahms as pargons of their time, if certainly not ours — one had to wonder why it seems so hard to address the middle, to speak with a voice that is at once elevated and common.
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