Michael Hersch: end stages; Violin Concerto
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin. International Contemporary Ensemble/Tito Munoz
New Focus Recordings 208
Total Time:  53:10
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Michael Hersch (b. 1971-) is a critically-acclaimed composer, and pianist, whose work has been gaining a steady stream of attention since he first won the Concordia American Composer Award in 1996.  He currently is chair of composition at the Peabody Institute, John Hopkins University.  This new release features two of his more recent works performed by the artists that commissioned them.

As one of the Artistic Partners with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Patricia Kopatchinskaja commissioned Hersch’s Violin Concerto (2015).  The work is cast in a less traditional four-movement form and at its heart depicts the life and death of one of the composer’s friends.  It opens with a burst of visceral clusters and intense, seemingly disparate lines that create an intense, acerbic quality.  The orchestra is practically brutalized with the soloist weaving in and out of this intense texture often inserting itself into large, angular leaps and jumps while additional extremes occur around it.  The departure point of the work was a couple of poems by Thomas Hardy.  The first fragment from A Commonplace Day has imagery of gnawing, flames, and ghostly implications.  These may have led to the almost nightmarish qualities of this movement which eventually dies away in its final bars like an anguished plea entering exhaustion.  A two-note motif of close intervals moves into the second movement with a sense of extremes hovering above slow-moving, dense, harmonies.  This sense of unsettled calm slowly grows to a still more agitated state as the piece progresses.  The third movement is nearly as long as the previous two combined.  While there is a stillness in its ethereal opening bars, there is no relaxation from the intensity of the harmonic structures which are often densely-packed close intervals.  The violin sometimes suddenly explodes into the silence with unusual spurts almost like a cutting motion across the desolation and unusual harmonies.  There are some telling moments of almost tonal beauty that emerges towards its end.  The final movement is a series of final anguishes that recall some of the opening gestures of the first movement.  One gets a sense that the piece pits the soloist as the artist within their own madness and frustration that seems to go unnoticed in the dense, world that surrounds them in their grief and ends with a single teardrop.  Hersch’s concerto is along the lines of some of the more intense music of Penderecki.  The Violin Concerto is a very visceral work that is perhaps almost too long.  The third movement may very well work better on its own to tighten up the other three to a more manageable aural whole.  To say the work is challenging would be an understatement.  But, it gets a fine performance here in rich detail.

The multi-movement end stages (2016) was commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra who performs it here.  The work was inspired by a series of drawings by Kevin Tuttle.  Tuttle was the set designer for Hersch’s monodrama, On the Threshold of Winter.  The drawings appear in the accompanying booklet and are a variety of outlines and sketches of the human body in a mix of macabre-like expressions or taken as a body or head.  They are a bit reminiscent of the work of Oskar Kokoschka.  Therein lies perhaps one possible window into Hersch’s musical world which tends to have the idea of death very much in the very fabric of the music, a rethinking of modernist and expressionist imagery in music.  In this case, the music itself is also like a quick sketch briefly exploring a passing thought or blurred image.  The third movement itself is but a mere nine measures.  The longer final three movements each become increasingly more reflective with darker sonorities.  It is as if we move from the first utterances of disbelief and shock to the depths that are too deep for words.

Hersch’s work here comes out of the more modernist styles that challenge our understanding of sound and form.  The music itself is a collection of sinews that seem to be dissected in front of us and which force us to accept dissonance.  Sometimes this works against the end result which can seem overlong and diffuse.  One can hear this most often in contemporary horror scoring, especially in the work of Joseph Bishara who smooths out some of the intensity one hears in Hersch’s concert music.  This is not music for the faint of heart but highly worth exploring, though it might be better to start with second work first.

Romberg: Symphony No. 4/Mozart: Violin Concerto/Haydn
Julia Schroder, violin.
Collegium Musicum Basel/Kevin Griffiths
CPO 555 175
Total Time:  60:12
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

As the 18^th Century drew to a close, the threat of the Ottoman Empire, which had terrorized Europe for almost a century, would come to a close with the Austro-Turkish Wars with the Hapsburg’s bringing them to an end in 1791.  The somewhat dubious treaty would result in partitioning the Balkans and parts of Eastern Europe.  The Turks had come as far as the city gates of Vienna in 1683 and their terror was something well-known to the likes of Viennese composers.  Haydn’s own grandparents were among the few who survived the destruction of Hainburg that very year.  Western music owes some of its percussion to the appearance of the military Janissary bands that made up the armies.  These instruments, melodies, and specific rhythms would lend themselves to a host of Western pieces.  Most notably is Haydn’s own Military Symphony which explores this both from the percussion instruments employed, but also in subtle rhythmic motives in the work.  Of course, more famous are Mozart’s own “Rondo alla turca” from his Piano Sonata, K. 331.  Beethoven also would write music with Turkish influences in his music for The Ruins of Athens.  There are a host of works that are overtly identified with this musical “inspiration” and three of them appear on this new release with a rarer symphony by Andreas Romberg (1767-1821), a familiar Mozart violin concerto, and a Haydn overture.

The sequencing for the album is a bit backwards with the overture being tracked at the end as more of an encore than the appropriate concert overture.  Instead, we are treated to the brief Symphony No. 4, Op. 51 (“Alla turca”) by Romberg.  He was a court musician for most of his life serving in first Munster and Bonn before playing in the German Theater Orchestra of Hamburg.  He would eventually succeed Louis Spohr as capellmeister there.  Romberg wrote ten symphonies of which 4 were published in his lifetime.  Of them was the work heard here which was first performed December 22, 1798, in Hamburg.  It is notable not only for its additional percussion, but also for a piccolo part.  The music is otherwise a fairly acceptable late-Classical work with the cymbals and bass drum adding an appropriate punch to the lyrical, mostly forgettable theme in the opening “Allegro”.  A little chromaticism also makes an appearance for a nice touch.  Swirling strings help move us along as the music hovers back and forth from major to minor.  Trumpets and horns add a bit more emphasis.  The minuet goes as one might expect with the trio featuring nice wind writing, notable for including the piccolo here too.  Notable here is the rather interesting off-kilter rhythmic idea with some occasional harmonic choices that delight.  The slow movement has good string writing hinting a bit at romanticism in the wings.  A march-like finale brings the work to an exciting close.  While the thematic ideas are not as catchy as one might hope, it is still rather interesting to hear how Romberg is exploring these “new” instruments within the context of the 18^th-Century symphony.  The dramatic aspects help with the big cadences showing off things most.  The ensemble certainly lends itself well to a committed performance.

In more familiar music, Julia Schroder explores Mozart’s most popular Violin Concerto in A, K. 219 (1775) which is noted for when the celli and basses play with the wood of their bow to create a rather interesting percussive effect.  Other similarities to Romberg’s ideas include interesting chromatic crescendos and those shifts into the minor mode coupled with interesting rhythmic accents in the finale.  The piece is among one of Mozart’s most popular (over 100 recordings currently in the catalogue).  It allows for a variety of interesting themes and opportunities for the soloist.  Among them is a striking dramatic moment in the opening movement signaling an almost operatic drama to the work.  The ensemble has a decidedly different audio quality that feels slightly fuller than in the Romberg.  This may be equally due to familiarity and confidence in the Mozart.  Schroder’s playing is quite beautiful in the Adagio interruption and this sets the tone for her lyrical playing style.  There is certainly a sense of joy in this performance that is warmly supported by the orchestra.  While the Romberg required a bit more brashness at times, the Mozart highlights the ensemble’s delicate, and lyrical side quite well.

Haydn’s opera, L’incontro improvviso (1775) is taken from a story also explored by Gluck.  Set in Turkey and involving the odd comic abduction tale.  The “Overture” is in the Italian form with a special concert ending used here as written by the composer.  It has some interesting Turkish color but the bulk will be used within the opera itself.  It serves its purpose to set us up for the odd adventures to follow.

All three works here are examples of composers exploring “unusual” and “strange” musical instruments and worlds though each are quite conventional for the period as one might anticipate.  The Mozart is the strongest work of the three and a well-done performance to boot which makes the others nice discoveries of musical history.