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 20^th 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.

Spoon Hanging From My Nose: The Music of J.A. Kawarsky
Jonathan Helton, alto saxophone. Chicago Arts Orchestra/Javier Mendoza;
Arizona Choir and Ensemble/Bruce Chamberlain;
Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra/Petr Vronsky;
St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra/Vladimir Landa
Navona Records 6091
Total Time: 71:39
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Composer J.A. Kawarsky (b. 1959) studied at Iowa State University and Northwestern University.  He currently teaches theory and composition at Rider University in New Jersey.  As a noted theater conductor, he conducted the 2007 tour of Peter Pan and worked on the second national tour of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.  In this new release, listeners have the opportunity to hear three orchestral works as well as an orchestration of the Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes, Op. 52.  Kawarsky writes in a tonal language with some modern touches and also likes to place references, or quotes, of other music within the contexts of his work which is on display in the pieces featured here.

The Chicago Arts Orchestra opens the program with Fastidious Notes (2006) which appeared as part of Prisma (Navona 6141).  The work is a piece of quotation music that incorporates folk tunes (“I Ride an Old Paint”) which leads to some further nods to Copland.  Within the fabric of the work Kawarsky also makes references to Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb.  Oriignally for wind ensemble, the piece has been reworked into this chamber orchestra version heard here.  The music is in a delightfully light, and rather airy style featuring traditional harmonic writing with crystal-clear orchestral textures that allow the solo saxophone to shine through.  Jonathan Helton, for whom the work was written, has a beautiful, warm tone that really soars across the orchestra here.  It seems just a little forward in the sound picture with the orchestra feeling a bit recessed.

Brahms composed his choral Liebeslieder Waltzes between 1863 and 1871.  Some point to these love songs as a sort of redirection by Brahms of his love for Clara Schumann.  It is also quite likely that the composer had Schubert in mind, a sort of updating of that composer’s romantic Art Song approach with the advanced mid-century harmony.  The more popular of the two collections is Op. 52 which contains 18 little songs for choir and originally piano 4-hands.  These are all simply delightful pieces and over the years have had various adaptations.  Kawarsky’s work as a choral and musical theater conductor no doubt comes into play in his own orchestrations of these pieces.  He has found a wonderful balance between a woodwind quartet (with piccolo, English horn, and bass clarinet substitutions along the way), light percussion, harp, piano, and string trio (violin, cello, bass).  The instrumental additions are really marvelous as they intersect with the choral writing and all feel so natural one may wonder that they were not already there.  The style fits well with the music, perhaps adding an almost salon-like feel to these pieces with touches of operetta.  One might think of it more as an enhancement to Brahms’ choral writing and it works very well.  The Arizona Choir and instrumental ensemble provides an excellent performance of this repertoire piece which would make the album worth seeking out on its own.

And We All Waited… (2013) was composed following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings.  A more introspective work, the piece opens quietly and then moves into a somewhat martial feel with a variety of different musical lines swirling about presenting different arguments only to be silenced.  As in the other works here, Kawarsky interweaves references to Nielsen, Reicha, and Shostakovich.  The musical ideas begin trying to discover a possible answer with the more militant interludes seeming to put an end to each possible solution.  A more serious work whose own searching makes the piece more episodic in nature, though no less compelling with its seemingly questioning conclusion.

The final work on the album appeared on an earlier compilation called Winter’s Warmth (Navona 6091).  Episodes (2001) explores asymmetrical meters in the opening portion and, like the other pieces on the album, has moments that recall Prokofiev and Dave Brubeck.  A more lyrical section references a Jewish melody in a more romantic piano style.  The final section has a reference to Finzi.  It is an equally strong work that is good to have in this composer album.

Kawarsky’s music is always engaging and delightfully orchestrated.  The music’s various quotations, often esoteric, are well woven into the fabric of his musical language and help invite the listener into his musical arguments and discussions.  The Brahms orchestrations here are really worth the price of admission, but the original compositions are as worth one’s time, if not more so revealing a composer whose music deserves wider recognition.