April 10, 2019

  • Orchestral Imagery from Cervetti

     

    Parallel Realms
    Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra/Petr Vronsky
    Navona Records 6217
    Total Time:  48:23
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    Sergio Cervetti’s music has appeared on a number of Navona releases.  The Uruguayan-born composer studied with Ernst Krenek and first gained critical attention at the 1966 Venezuela Music Festival.  Over the course of his long career his music explores the sorts of aesthetic and creative shifts of the latter 20th Century from serialism to minimalism.  Two of the three orchestral works on this release were composed more recently with one being a revision from a piece earlier in the composer’s career.

    First is the symphonic poem Et in Arcadia ego (2017.  The music here capture a blend of meditative reflection and a sense of awe at the natural wonders of an island off the coast of Uruguay, Martin Garcia.  One might discern references to bird calls in the texture which is built around the interval of a minor second.  This idea connects throughout the piece, in an almost ongoing pattern that is a blend of ostinato technique and minimalist qualities.  As it transfers through the orchestra, different sections respond with their own interpretation and expansion of this motive moving us gradually away from this to a more postmodern style.  The music is atonal but has an almost Romantic style of orchestral imagery and color which eventually gives way briefly to a traditional criollo tune.  This floats into the texture and tries to overcome the overarching pillars of dissonance.  Soon the more atonal realms and bird calls return to lend an over-arching shape to the piece.

    Consolamentum (2016) takes inspiration from the persecution of the Cathars during the Inquisition.  The music takes their experience of martyrdom and waiting for death as they try to unite with a deeper religious plane and experience.  Cervetti expands his primary motive to the tension created between two chords.  In this non-tonal setting, they serve as an anchoring harmony and another where the music moves toward and from on a structural level.  The music here tends to focus on an exploration of this modal-sounding harmony and resulting lines.  As they come together, it begins to lend a sense of the intensity from a meditative to more overwhelming experience.  In this respect, Messiaen’s serio-religious orchestral works come to mind of which this is a very distant cousin.  The two primary harmonic ideas help provide an idea for the listener to grasp onto while the other material seems to swirl around it and add a dramatic narrative to the experience.

    Cervetti returned to one of his early works, Plexus, which he composed in 1970 and revised in 2016.  The semi-graphic score originally incorporated radio and TV slogans that were spoken by orchestra members.  This early piece reveals some of the tension the composer was exploring in his own work and what directions he might take.  Total serialism was not an answer and while minimalism was still a new development, he seems to have taken a collage approach.  Using a sense of ideas branching ever outward until they eventually dissipate.  The music manages to embrace an expanded tonality that can then explode into a variety of clusters and cacophonous sounds.  While it continues to move outward, one feels as if music itself is being stretched outward until we must contemplate where we are headed in the resulting silence.

    For those interested in contemporary orchestral music, Parallel Realms is an excellent way to become familiar with Cervetti’s music.  The canvases are large and the music shifts between these aleatoric and minimalist realms as both consonance and dissonance are used to serve the dramatic imagery or concepts of the music.  Each work has much to reveal upon further exploration and listening as well.