March 15, 2010

  • Review: Rochberg's Piano Music Volume 1

     

    George Rochberg: Piano Music 1—Circles of Fire
    Hirsch-Pinkas Piano Duo
    Naxos 8.559631
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    George Rochberg (1918-2005) was one of those composers whose name you ran across back in the 1980s and 1990s.  Depending on what coast you studied on his music was either raised up, or dismissed.  This had a lot to do with ones experience of American serialist composers of which Rochberg was originally one and whether or not one was willing to follow his embracing of more tonal expression after the mid-1960s.  By the time Rochberg came to write Circles of Fire in 1996-1997 he was quite capable of discovering ways to meld both expressively.  Sometimes serialists who stray from strict writing tend to create music that is more pointillistic aurally.  The result can be a series of seemingly disjoint musical phrases but often of a highly expressive nature.  It can also result in what seems like utter chaos.  Rochberg also was an early proponent of quotation and collage; that is borrowing segments, themes, or ideas from past classics and inserting them in different ways into his own work.  All of these things are on display in the present work.  The expressiveness of this particular piece in the hands of the Hirsch-Pinkas duo is what helps create the bridge necessary to enter into this strange mostly atonal world.

    A long time ago a new composer revealed to me that he had written a 45 minute piano sonata of which he was very proud.  As a public radio programmer I honestly had to tell him that this would be a hard piece to get much airplay as even under the best of circumstances some other shorter piece or more traditional work would always win out over a new work.  Imagine then how most classical music stations will be challenged to find time for this 70 minute duo piano piece!

    Rochberg’s piece is filled with 15 mostly brief sections.  The work is bookended by a “Solemn Refrain” which helps delineate larger segments of the piece in three interior placements.  The first “Chiaroscuro” is an arch-like piece of mostly atonal writing which is followed by a strictly serial “Canonic Variations.”  The fourth movement, “Gioco del fuoco” has a great deal of Bartokian playfulness and flirts with tonality in what is the first of the four longer segments at 7 minutes.  It is one of the more engaging and stronger movements of the piece.  Overall the longer movements are signposts of a sort, this one seeming to focus on chaos of which pianist has the more important material.  “Nebulae” is a “free” chance composition with the music allowing both performers and listeners a lengthy repose from the nervous energy that has come before it.  It is at the center of the piece and is composed without meter or note values with the duration being determined by the performers.  “Sognando” is a slow-moving piece of semi-quotation music with quotations from Brahms Clarinet Sonata, Op. 120, no. 1 and the Intermezzo, Op. 118, no. 4.  Here the music is stretched out beyond imagining with a rather dreamlike quality that sometimes is reminiscent of a pianist working slowly through a piece of music.  The post-romantic feel of this movement seems out of place in its surroundings but Rochberg’s structural need for this anchor in Romanticism is a perfect match for the fugue (with quotations from Bach), canon, ricercar (a rather short piece of repetitive music that continuously loops until the performers tire of it, hence its title “The Infinite Ricercar”), and other suggestive musical titles and forms explored in the monumental work.

    In short, Circles of Fire is a monumental and essential work that encapsulates the different musical expressions of Rochberg’s output.  It manages to traverse various musical periods from the Renaissance to the present through the way individual movements are structured or even in the musical language used to communicate Rochberg’s ideas.  It may not be the first piano disc you turn to, but there is much to be discovered in this music that a score will help reveal to music students.  Though deeply-conceived, the piece still is more than a cerebral musical exercise.

    Naxos has managed to snatch up the Gasparo catalogue of which this is a part (originally appearing on Gasparo 343).  It might have been nice to have more separation between the two instruments but this is a minor quibble.  Evan Hirsch and Sally Pinkas recorded 5 volumes of Rochberg’s piano music and this launching of that important addition to the Rochberg discography is quite welcome.  Once again, great music, well-performed and at a price that allows for trying something new and different—hallmarks of what makes Naxos such a fine label.