February 27, 2017

• Chamber Music by Sergio Cervetti

   Sunset at Noon
  Sergio Cervetti, piano; Maria Teresa Chenlo, harpsichord;
  Alden Ortuno Cabezas, clarinet. Leonardo Perez Baster and Luis Alberto Marino Fernandez, violins. Yamed Aguillon Santa Cruz, viola. Lester Monier Serrano, cello/Enrique Perez Mesa;
  Vit Muzik, violin. Dominika Muzikova, viola;
  Kuhn Choir/Marek Vorlicek
  Navona Records 6072
  Total Time:  67:02
  Recording:   ****/****
  Performance: ****/****

  The Uruguayan-born composer Sergio Cervetti studied with Ernst Krenek and gained attention at the 1966 Venezuela Music Festival when he won a prize for chamber music.  He taught first in Berlin, and then for many years at the Tisch School in New York.  His work is a microcosm of the shifts from serial to minimalist styles of the latter 20^th Century to post-modernism mixing electronic and acoustic music.  The works here cover pieces composed between 1995 and 2015 and are part of a series of six albums of Cervetti’s music being released by Parma Recordings.  The present release takes its title from the earliest work on the disc, Sunset at Noon.  The pieces here all bear dedications in memoriam for a variety of historical and personal connections.

  The opening work, Some Realms I Owned (2010) has a decided minimalist feel in its first movement with its undulating middle register piano lines and a dark line in the left hand.  The harmonies do have a rather melancholy feel which reflects the subject of the work, a friend who died of cancer.  The three movements are an intimate reflection on the life of  a friend, wife, and mother further inspired by a poem by Elizabeth Bishop (“One Art”).  The music here is in a perfect parallel to Philip Glass, but has moments of emotional outbursts that fall closer to Romantic piano styles.  The second movement begins with a beautiful line that shifts into darker territory.  A secondary idea also has a moment of reflective beauty that is shattered by a series of dissonant falling chords.  The final movement begins with a flurry of passage work and a sort of cortege-like feel as it moves into dark dissonant rolled chords.  This very personal work pulls the listener in rather quickly into these shifts of frustration, reflection, and glimmers of hope.  It is performed by the composer.

  The clarinet quintet, And the Huddled Masses (2015), has a special resonance today.  The phrase should be familiar as it is taken from the text at the Statue of Liberty.  Cervetti composed this piece as a testament to welcoming refugees and migrants in the midst of ever-growing resistance in this country.  The opening movement, “The Tired, the Poor, and the Huddled Masses”, features some sliding pitches and a stark musical style broken by the warm tone of the clarinet.  Somehow the music seems to move beautifully through this sense of anxiety to a final moment of hope at a new life.  The asymmetrical meter of the second movement provides a sense of the hustle and faster pace of life.  Still, the clarinet line helps provide a bit of a constant as it moves across the pizzicato string textures.  Sometimes it joins in for minute only to go off on its own tangent.  The final movement connects again with the theme of these chamber works being written as an elegy for a young Ecuadoran woman who committed suicide when she was prevented from entering the country to join her parents in New York.  Cervetti incorporates music from Mozart to add an additional emotional core to this final intense reflection.

  A work for solo harpsichord follows.  Ofrenda Pra Guyunusa (2011) is meant to explore a sense of man’s cruelty to native peoples.  In the 19^th Century, it was a common practice to capture native people’s from “exotic lands” for circuses and carnivals where they were put on display.  Here, Cervetti refers to a Charrua Indian who suffered this fate and ended up on display in a Paris carnival.   It is somewhat fascinating to hear this work on this particular instrument as it sometimes feels like this could be a guitar work, but the harpsichord lends it an almost bizarre feel reflecting this captured person’s beauty like a bird in a cage.

  To honor students who died during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, Cervetti composed this four-movement homage for violin and viola from which the album takes its name.  Each movement bares the names of the students.  This is an expectedly intimate work is like a series of dialogues with a style that feels more rooted to early music though with modern harmonic language at times.  It is cast in four-movements with a sonata-feel in the tempi and overall structure of the work.  Already in this 1995 work, one can see this unique way Cervetti crafts these stunning lyrical lines that float out of the texture.  It is even more fascinating how the work manages to stay engaging throughout.  The third movement comes almost like a breath of fresh air with its great energy and almost down-home Americana feel.  This serves as a perfect tradition to the final movement, “Hymn”, which offers a telling reflective, and quite touching intimate finale.

  I Can’t Breathe (2014) is a brief work whose title is torn from the brutal headlines of racial unrest today.  The words were uttered by a victim of police brutality and launched the Black Lives Matter movement.  Cervetti’s work for piano and percussion, performed here by him, is meant to help rally us to overcome this violence.  Fittingly, it is also the most intense and contemporary-sounding of the pieces here.

  The final work here is a sacred motet for unaccompanied choir.  Lux Lucet in Tenebris.  It serves as a reminder that the darkness has been overcome and that hope exists. The text is from the Gospel of John 1:1-7.  It is, simply put, gorgeous, and wraps up this disc very well.

  As is the case with Navona’s releases, the equalization of the different venues is handled well so that they all play from one to the other without the need for further volume adjustment.  The chamber pieces have a warm atmosphere that is not too close to the performers.  The programming works quite well to move from one instrumental combination to another.  Each work explores the trumpet in unique ways even if the performance techniques employed are similar.  The end results are always quite different.  Certainly, those interested in contemporary chamber music should seek out this new release.

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