Variations on a Summer Day & Piano Quartet – Open G Records
San Francisco Chronicle
Stylistic versatility can sometimes be a mixed blessing for a composer, but Harold Meltzer puts it to wonderful use in the song cycle that takes up most of this enchanting and unpredictable new release. In setting Wallace Stevens’ “Variations on a Summer Day,” Meltzer tackles a 20-stanza skein of sensory evocations, memories and ruminations that skitter this way and that, and his writing for chamber group and soprano is vividly responsive. Each strophe creates a distinctive sound world on the fly — now fiercely dissonant, now languid and sweet-toned — and the piece moves from one to the next with quicksilver elusiveness. Anchoring the proceedings are Meltzer’s sure-footed harmonic palette and the subtle eloquence of Abigail Fischer’s singing, which seems to dart over and under Stevens’ words, illuminating them from within. Meltzer’s Piano Quartet, which alternates between prickly pointillism and full-voiced lyricism, makes an inviting curtain-raiser.
The Wall Street Journal
Composers who cloak their works in the genre-agnostic garb of the post-Minimalist and indie classical styles get most of the attention now, but other approaches to contemporary musical language have not surrendered the field entirely. Lately it has seemed, in fact, as though the energy that indie composers have brought to new music has also enlivened styles that adhere more closely to traditional roots.
Recent CDs by the composers Jessica Krash, Harold Meltzer and Mark Applebaum show that there is still plenty to be said in hybrids that temper neo-Romantic lushness with post-tonal grittiness, as well as in electronic music and even post-tonal acerbity, particularly when it is tempered with a sense of novelty.
Ms. Krash’s “Past Made Present” (Albany) offers five works in which she filters slices of the past through a contemporary sensibility. In “The Cantigas de Amigo of Martin Codax ” and “Sulpicia’s Songs” (both composed in 2015), that past is distant, but Ms. Krash’s updating takes different forms. For the first, a setting of poetry from a 13th-century manuscript in which Codax’s Galician-Portuguese poems of friendship and loneliness are accompanied by vaguely outlined melodies, Ms. Krash retained the melismatic Medieval vocal lines, but added a decidedly modern piano accompaniment in which splashes of color (including some plucking and strumming inside the instrument) amplify Codax’s emotional outpouring.
“Sulpicia’s Songs,” based on sections of a work by the first century B.C. Roman poet Sulpicia, is more conventional: Ms. Krash made no attempt to imagine an ancient Roman musical style; instead, she captures Sulpicia’s dignified outrage over being abandoned by her lover in an appealingly chromatic vocal line, with a mildly dissonant, emotionally responsive piano accompaniment. Emily Noël sings both works with an alluring clarity and fluidity, qualities that Ms. Krash matches at the keyboard.
A choral work, “Young Vilna” (2017), based on questions young Lithuanians posed to Ellen Cassedy, the author of “We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust,” is alternately tense and hauntingly beautiful. And two instrumental works treat the past more abstractly: “Turns of Phrase” (2016) for flute and piano (played by Laura Kaufman and Ms. Krash) was inspired by an ancient (but still used) Japanese instrument, the shakuhachi, but is couched almost entirely in Western chromaticism; and “Delphi—What the Oracle Said” (1997, revised 2014), a melancholy soliloquy for solo cello, is given a firm (if not necessarily oracular) reading by Tanya Anisimova.
Mr. Meltzer, like Ms. Krash, is less interested in waging stylistic battles than in finding fresh ways to work with established forms and a mostly tonal language. A pairing of two works completed in 2016—a chamber setting of Wallace Stevens’s “Variations on a Summer Day” and a Piano Quartet (Open G Records)—thrives on ample invention and an astute sense of color. The quartet, played by members of the Boston Chamber Music Society, is an episodic, single-movement piece, its stream of short sections marked in the score with calibrated expressions of emotional states—ardent, effervescent, contented and ecstatic, among them. It can seem whimsically changeable at times, but a handful of returning figures give it a unifying frame.
“Variations on a Summer Day” flows similarly, morphing gradually through each of the poem’s 20 brief stanzas, the music reflecting the imagery of the text. There is some overt tone painting—when Stevens mentions gulls, you hear them gabbling—but more typically, Mr. Meltzer’s responses capture Stevens’s shifting seaside moods. Abigail Fischer sings the piece vividly, with members of Sequitur, conducted by Jayce Ogren, moving easily through the score’s episodes of pointillism, stateliness and hazy dissonance.
Mr. Applebaum’s “Speed Dating” (Innova) is a fascinating stylistic grab bag. Its biggest treats involve very different kinds of text setting. In “Three Unlikely Corporate Sponsorships” (2016), Mr. Applebaum multitracked himself reciting comic, politically sharp-edged ruminations about Nestlé, General Motors and Halliburton, with clever wordplay yielding terrific rhythmic counterpoint.
“Clicktrack” (2015), played by the Southern Oregon University Percussion Ensemble, at first sounds like a straightforward percussion piece, full of chiming bell tones, tapping and scratching. But the sounds are governed by sonnets of K. Silem Mohammad, heard at first only by the musicians (as cues, in their headphones), and later by listeners as the percussionists recite (sometimes in whispers) fragments while playing.
The collection’s other works are atonal and process-driven. For “Skeletons in the Closet” (2009), Mr. Applebaum resurrected eight 1980s synthesizers, and created an algorithm to sample their sound libraries. The result is a riot of tactile bursts of timbre rarely heard since laptops became electronic music’s main instruments. In “Speed Dating” (2014), performed by the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, Mr. Applebaum brings together pairs of instruments for brief, spirited encounters before recombining them (hence the title). And Takao Hyakutome gives an acidic reading of “The Plate of Transition Nourishes the Chameleon Appetite” (1992, revised 1994), a tart solo violin work.
There are moments when you wish Mr. Applebaum would settle on a single musical language. But then, why should he?
—Mr. Kozinn writes about music for the Journal.
Opera News
HAROLD MELTZER is a prolific composer and an inventive concert programmer who built a strong career in the past decade on his own and as codirector of the New York-based new-music ensemble Sequitur. His latest recording presents his Piano Quartet (2016) and Variations on a Summer Day (2012–16), an extended setting for soprano and chamber ensemble of Wallace Stevens’ 1939 poem.
Meltzer composes in an accomplished, conservative voice that features a panoply of musical textures and stylistic references. Rather than extended musical structures, he offers here sequences of small vignettes, each about a minute or so in duration, one following another. Clearly, the ordering has been carefully thought out. The listener moves from one episode to another, enjoying the many contrasts. It’s the perfect mode for expressing the twenty aphoristically brief verses of the Stevens poem.
Variations on a Summer Day features soprano Abigail Fischer sounding warm-voiced and heartfelt. She brings the right emotional tone to each of these quite different verses. The musicians of Sequitur, conducted by Jayce Ogren, ably accompany her.
Meltzer’s Piano Quartet is performed dynamically by musicians from the Boston Chamber Music Society. As with the performers in Variations on a Summer Day, the players exhibit taut focus and exuberant spirit. This fine release makes a very good introduction to Harold Meltzer’s music.
Voix des Arts
HAROLD MELTZER (born 1966): Variations on a Summer Day and Piano Quartet—Abigail Fischer, soprano; Tara Helen O’Connor and Barry Crawford, flute; Alan Kay and Vicente Alexim, clarinet; Margaret Kampmeier, piano; Cyrus Beroukhim, Miranda Cuckson, and Andrea Schultz, violin; Daniel Panner, viola; Greg Hesselink, cello; Jayce Ogren, conductor; Boston Chamber Music Society [Recorded at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City, USA, on 25 March 2017 (Piano Quartet) and 28 – 30 March 2017 (Variations on a Summer Day); Open G Records 888295672382; 1 CD, 40:51; Available from Bandcamp.com]
Originality for its own sake is scarcely better than unimaginative adherence to traditions. Popularity is not universally indicative of quality, but traditions are rarely devoid of some degree of celebration of the exceptional. Newly-minted words with nothing to say merely clutter languages that are already ludicrously verbose, widening the chasm between thought and expression in ways that further complicate the critical act of communication. As a physical manifestation of the most honest aspects of humanity, Art must communicate necessary truths too uncomfortable for everyday discourse and must do so in ways that demand attention and action. For music, it is not enough to spin a beguiling melody or beat out a distracting rhythm. Whether old or new, the sounds must forge connections among people—connections that engender harmonious resolutions for life’s chaotic cacophonies.
There are no formulæ that reliably concoct success for a composer of what is now identified as ‘serious’ music. Few composers in the recent history of Classical Music are likely to have been spared enduring the well-meaning dictate that artistic fulfillment depends upon originality, but originality in music is a misleading notion. All that has been achieved by musicians since the inception of composing in written form notwithstanding, the available tonal spectra are finite. Whether music makes use of quarter tones, tone rows, counterpoint, scordatura, or any of the thousands of effects that fill musicological glossaries, the basic structural tenets are unchanging. Success as a composer begins with recognizing that originality does not demand abandonment of the time-tested fundaments of music.
That Johannes Brahms was one of the most powerful instigators of musical evolution is indisputable, but which bold innovation in music does one attribute solely to Brahms’s invention? Brahms’s genius was not in discarding established methods and fabricating new ones: he altered the course of music’s cyclical metamorphoses by perfecting the forms he inherited from past masters and reshaping them to realize his own designs. As a reformer looking to both the past and the future, Brooklyn-born composer Harold Meltzer is among Brahms’s most gifted Twenty-First-Century heirs. The pieces on this expertly-produced Open G Records disc ask the listener not only to absorb the complexities of the sonic layers but also to consider their meaning. Why did Meltzer choose these forms, these instruments, these words? This is not arbitrarily-conceived music. Like Brahms, Meltzer has crafted an individual style not by rejecting the work of his artistic ancestors but by respecting, learning from, and continuing it. His is originality with purpose.
Written in 2016 in memory of composer Steven Stucky (1949 – 2016), Meltzer’s Piano Quartet is a thought-provoking but never coldly academic piece in which novelty and nostalgia interact in a mesmerizingly intricate ballet. The spirit of Meltzer’s memorial to a fellow artist is anything but funereal: this music is a paean to living, remembering, carrying on, and moving forward. The adjectives combined by the composer with metronome markers in lieu of conventional verbal instructions of tempo and temperament—effervescent, ardent, ecstatic, eager, poignant, ebullient, contented, sparkling—are observed so meticulously by the Boston Chamber Music Society musicians—violinist Harumi Rhodes, violist Dimitri Murrath, cellist Raman Ramakrishnan, and pianist Max Levinson—that an attentive listener might use precisely these words to describe the impact of this performance of the piece. The through-composed structure of his quartet differs from the architecture of these earlier works, but Meltzer’s part writing fleetingly recalls both Brahms’s three piano quartets and Antonín Dvořák’s superb Opus 87 Piano Quartet. Notable for inspired use of pizzicato, the emotional epicenter of the American composer’s quartet is the ‘Dreamwaltz for Steve,’ an episode further distinguished by kaleidoscopic intermingling of instrumental textures and timbres that amplify a faint echo of Beethoven. The instrumentalists are alert to the music’s subtleties, navigating the work’s expressive transformations with playing of unwavering technical mastery. This is a sophisticated performance of significant, splendidly-scored music.
A setting of verses by American poet Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955), Meltzer’s Variations on a Summer Day discloses a rare affinity for perceiving the inherent song in words and fashioning music that manifests that song for performers and listeners. Stevens’s text is a stream-of-conscious meditation that is not unlike the mature work of writers as seemingly dissimilar as T. S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg, the thoughts within his lines seeming to exist externally, free-standing concepts that are not reasoned but encountered like landmarks along a path. The poet blurred the distinctions between physical and metaphysical, and Meltzer embraces this ambiguity in writing that is at once earthly and ephemeral. Though their musical idioms are very different, there is a familial relationship between the narrator of Variations on a Summer Day and the nameless protagonist of Francis Poulenc’s La voix humaine. Like Poulenc’s incarnation of Jean Cocteau’s surrealistic drama, Variations on a Summer Day is an engrossing exchange with an unheard conversant. Mimicking nature’s cycles, the music imparts a sense of inevitability: rather than beginning and ending with contrived formality, the music rises to the surface for the duration of Variations on a Summer Day and then retreats into silence, waiting to be heard again.
Under the direction of conductor Jayce Ogren, the musicians to whom performing Variations on a Summer Day for this recording was entrusted play Meltzer’s music with an abiding interpretive spontaneity, vividly limning the score’s tonal unpredictability. Flautists Tara O’Connor and Barry Crawford, clarinetists Alan Kay and Vicente Alexim, violinists Miranda Cuckson and Andrea Schultz, violist Daniel Panner, cellist Greg Hesselink, and pianist Margaret Kampmeier approach this music with obvious preparation, but their playing is appealingly free from artifice. [In the passages beginning with ‘Round and round goes the bell of the water’ and ‘Low tide, flat water, sultry sun,’ violinist Cyrus Beroukhim deputizes for Cuckson. That the substitution is indiscernible is a testament to both musicians’ artistic integrity.] Cleanness of execution of the music’s rhythmic transitions is critical to the effectiveness of Variations on a Summer Day, but clinical exactitude would deprive the piece of its improvisational fervor. Guided by the apparent thoroughness of Ogren’s acquaintance with the score’s challenges, this performance is precise without ever being perfunctory.
It is often as an implicit euphemism for a less-flattering characterization that a singer is said to possess an unique voice, but soprano Abigail Fischer proves to be a peer of Bethany Beardslee, Cathy Berberian, and Jan DeGaetani as a singer with a wholly unique voice in the very best sense. A bright, forward placement of vowels and a flickering vibrato contribute to the fluidity of the soprano’s singing of both Meltzer’s music and Stevens’s words. Moreover, Fischer’s diction is little affected by notorious ‘opera singer English,’ her enunciation refreshingly natural. The exhilaration generated by her voicing of ‘Say of the gulls’ is tempered by the uneasy serenity of her declamation of ‘A music more than a breath.’ Fischer commands the irregular emotional tides of the sequence encompassing ‘The rocks of the cliffs,’ ‘Star over Monhegan,’ and ‘The leaves of the sea’ like a sorceress, wielding the magic of Meltzer’s music with able, assured vocalism.
A restless energy reminiscent of that found in Dylan Thomas’s poetry courses through ‘It is cold to be forever young,’ its sparks igniting Meltzer’s ingenuity. The music here grows more intense, and Fischer and Ogren sharpen their focus on the composer’s aural imagery. Singer and musicians lend ‘One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls’ a measure of lightness, and the accents of ‘An exercise in viewing the world’ and ‘This cloudy world’ are judiciously matched with the cadences of the words. Meltzer provides music of uncompromising directness for both ‘To change nature’ and ‘Now, the timothy at Pemaquid,’ and these performers give his lines readings of equal earnestness. Fischer sings ‘Everywhere the spruce trees bury soldiers’ with particular eloquence, joining Meltzer in evincing the ambivalence of the text with touching simplicity. Emotional honesty is also the heart of Fischer’s account of ‘Cover the sea with the sand rose,’ the vocal lines of which she sculpts with perfectly-balanced tenderness and toughness.
‘Words add to the senses’ is an apposite artistic credo for both Meltzer and Wallace Stevens—and for this performance of Variations on a Summer Day. Too often, words seem to stand in the way of today’s composers’ efforts at creating memorable music, but Meltzer seizes the opportunities for sketching familiar but previously unseen vistas offered by Stevens’s words. A near-Baroque sensibility permeates ‘The last island’ and ‘Round and round goes the bell of the water,’ the composer identifying distant vestiges of John Donne in the text, and Fischer sings the music with appropriately ringing tone that would serve her as stylishly in music by Bach or Telemann. Meltzer’s final variations emphasize the parallels between Stevens’s words and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Afforded a chance to demonstrate her dramatic instincts, Fischer sings ‘Pass through the door’ with unaffected sincerity. Her vocalism is impressive throughout the performance, but she saves her best singing for the final three segments, launching the work’s quest for renewal with a searching traversal of ‘Low tide, flat water, sultry sun.’ The strangely disquieting ‘One boy swims under a tub’ and ‘You could almost see the brass on her gleaming’ highlight the perpetuality of Variations on a Summer Day. Instead of proposing a resolution, they suggest an inexorable continuation of the voyage. Fischer, Ogren, and their colleagues eschew ostentatious gestures in Variations’ final pages: their sounds cease, but the music does not end.
In grasping at success that is increasingly difficult to define, today’s composers sometimes forget the ideal that should always be the objective of creativity. Scholars can debate whether originality is characterized by saying something entirely new or saying something that has been said before but differently, but the truest gauge of music’s success is its appeal to the listener. Sonic treatises on new ways of composing and performing music are valuable, but how often does one genuinely want to hear them? Harold Meltzer’s Piano Quartet and Variations on a Summer Day break new ground without subjecting the listener to gruesome noises of demolition. No idols of previous generations were smashed in the name of originality in the making of this music. Rather, this composer has molded contemporary music that is as pleasing as it is progressive. How original!
Fanfare
I’ve reviewed Harold Meltzer (b.1966) once before in Fanfare 34-4. That disc was a collection of shorter pieces, mostly vocal, though the real stunner for me was Brion, a work for mixed chamber ensemble that was evocative of the bright, astringent colors and textures of late Stravinsky, though never overly derivative. This new disc shows the composer ten years older, evidencing new levels of depth and ambition.
There are two works here. The Piano Quartet (2016) is in a single movement, and under fifteen minutes. But it suggests a greater architecture than its relatively short duration. Part of the reason is that the music is built on an alternation between music that is either very crisp and dancey, or far more open and lyrical. As a result, it feels as though it’s made of multiple movements, braided throughout the work. The effect of one of great clarity, and paradoxically, mystery.
Variations on a Summer Day (2012-16), however, is the main event. This is roughly a half-hour song cycle for mezzo and nine instruments (2 flutes, 2 clarinets, piano, and string quartet). The text is the eponymous 20-part cycle by Wallace Stevens, which in the poet’s usual mix of plainspoken but elusive mysticism, teases meanings out of images and experiences encountered on the Maine coast. Like his “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, it’s a series of all-American haiku (and also deals a lot with birds along the way).
It’s understandable how the composer would be drawn to this text. It is vast and ambitious, but also concise and intimate. Its invitation to write twenty jewel-like pieces was, I suspect, irresistible to Meltzer, whose music revels in this intersection of the micro and macro.
The sound of the music is also a bit different from what I’ve known before of his work. While still masterfully orchestrated (making his nonet sound like a full chamber orchestra), I also find its sound more full and blended than earlier pieces, where the juxtaposition of colors was a big point. Also, the harmonic language feels less overtly Stravinskian. The program notes emphasize such as “pre-populist” Copland, early Carter, and other American pantonal music of mid 20th-century. This is true, but I also hear a good deal of English influence as well, especially Tippett, the more lighthearted Maxwell Davies, and Knussen. It’s hard for me to pin down what creates this, but I hear tonally-rooted bass lines, triadic structures that are cubistically altered, and melodies that at times exude a whiff of folksong. There are a few little clues embedded that suggest to me that overtone structures may add to the sense of “naturalness” in the harmony.
The result is music that projects real ambition and a striving for beauty. It effectively spotlights what I consider perhaps the most beautiful vocal type, the mezzo. Meltzer is unafraid to repeat lines for dramatic/interpretive effect, and I applaud his courage, considering how iconic and taut is the original. He’s a scrupulous composer, but not fussy. I feel that all the notes are carefully considered and weighed to count as much as possible at every moment. But the “bagatelle” sequence of the structure projects a lightness of touch, something very in tune with Stevens.
Both performances are clear, precise, and committed. I can’t imagine the composer could have done better. I don’t have a sense that Meltzer is a prolific composer, but when he feels he has something to say and has the means to do so, he tackles the challenge with gusto. This is music of a composer fully in charge of his powers, and in his prime.
American Record Guide
Harold Meltzer’s music is light and luscious, bringing a new craftsmanship to tonality and new dimension to word painting. Though fans of Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland will love the piano quartet, the high point of this album is certainly Meltzer’s song cycle Variations on a Summer Day, with text by Wallace Stevens. The composer takes even the shortest of poems and elongates it into a colorful rush of texture and sound, often summoning up sounds from his ensemble that seem nearly impossible, given its instrumentation. Beautifully performed by soprano Abigail Fischer, this cycle should be programmed more often. It is a joy to listen to.
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review
I have had the pleasure of encountering the music of Harold Meltzer via a harpsichord work in an anthology.of harpsichord music I covered here some time ago (you can look it up by typing Meltzer in the search box at the top) and, most importantly, I reviewed his Naxos CD in 2010, which I loved (see the Gapplegate Music Review article of November 19, 2010 for that). Now it is time to turn to the new CD at hand, Meltzer’s Variations on a Summer Day & Piano Quartet (open g records).
The liner notes to the album sum up the composer’s recent development. Andrew Waggoner makes note of Meltzer’s 2007-08 Brion (on the Naxos release I reviewed, see above) as the culmination of the influence of Stravinsky and Donatoni. The later works heard here, Waggoner continues, move in a more individual direction at the same time as they tip the hat to the Pastoral American composers of the ’30s and ’40s of last century, and also make a connection with Copland’s beautiful “Piano Variations” and too his “Piano Quartet.”
All this does not contradict what I hear in this music. I must admit I am not so familiar with Donatoni. Nevertheless I hear the other influences mentioned without there being a derivation. These works bask in their originality at the same time as they offer a lively, lyrical and cogently Neo-Pastoral way ahead if you will.
Both works are substantial and have a winning aura about them. The “Piano Quartet” has none of the heavy romantic Germanicism of Pre-Modern chamber music. It is agile and light of foot, with lots of unexpected twists and lovely turns within a forward momentum.
“Variations on a Summer Day” brings in a central solo soprano part interpreted sturdily by Abigail Fischer. It all glows with a lazy summer sun ahead and the nine-piece chamber mini-orchestra scores with some truly special notefull-orchestrational tone paintings.
There is, then, some very welcome breeze freshening– there is a refreshing and beautifully Modern music lyricism on display in this album. Harold Meltzer is a phenomenon. The disk shows us how that is! Wonderful.
Fanfare: Want List
GANN Hyperchromatica — OTHER MINDS 1025-2
TENNEY Harmonium #1. For 12 Strings (rising). Two Koans and a Canon. Voice(s). Blues for Annie — Alfrun Schmid, cond; Scordatura Ensemble;Elizabeth Smalt (va) —NEW WORLD 80799-2
REFLECTIONS ON TIME AND MORTALITY Music of McDonald, Mozart, Bartók, Rachmaninov, Beethoven, Schubert, Janácek, Debussy, Brown, Stumpf, Joplin, Bach, Sacks, Biggs, Enescu, Wyner Thomas Stumpf (pn) ALBANY TROY1959/60 (2 CDs)
MELTZER Piano Quartet, Variations on a Summer Day — Boston Chamber Music Society; Abigail Fischer (ms), Jayce Ogren, cond., Sequitur —OPEN G
“WE, LIKE SALANGAN SWALLOWS” FELDMAN Chorus and Instruments. Voices and Instruments 1. Voices and Instruments 2. The Swallows of Salangan, OGDEN Three Statements.BROWN Small Pieces for Large Chorus.OLIVEROS Sound Patterns. BURT Elegy. CARL The City Astra Choir, John McCaughey, cond. NEW WORLD 80794-2(2 CDs)
Before I go to my formal Want List, I have to single out two recordings that came in late under the wire and are reviewed in this issue. Christian Wolff’s two orchestra pieces on New World 80792-2 are a revelation: majestic, mysterious, and plainspoken all at once. And Kyle Gann’s Custer and Sitting Bull (also on New World, 80801-2) is a remarkable monodrama “in two voices”, a visionary piece that was way ahead of its time when it was written and I hope now will achieve the recognition it deserves.
And on to the Final Five. One reason I put the Gann listed above in the second tier was that I already had his Hyperchormatica in the List and didn’t want to knock out something else deserving. This is an extraordinary feat of imagination, technique, and sheer fun. A book of music in just intonation for three computer-driven pianos; I think it’s a vision of the future, but like Ives, unafraid of roots in the past.
James Tenney was one of the most original thinkers/theoreticians of new music, but he was a superb composer as well. This New World release makes the case for just how sumptuous and sensuous his work could be. No composer since Henry Cowell has taken the overtone series and made such serious and beautiful music from it as a construct—indeed, in Tenney’s case I think it’s better.
From a different portion of the stylistic spectrum comes Harold Meltzer, a composer of great ambition, scrupulous technique, and real imagination. While his roots are more “modern classical”, that tradition doesn’t prelude real personality. His Variations on A Summer Day is a 20-part song cycle on the eponymous poem of Wallace Stevens, and takes us into a sound-world with shades of Carter, Tippett, and Knussen. But it’s very much the composer’s own, and I’m moved by it.
Thomas Stumpf is a Boston-based pianist who has released one of the most personal anthologies I’ve heard in years. It’s a collection of shorter repertoire works of a compressed, idiosyncratic, and elegiac tone, paired with contemporary pieces that play off their traditional counterparts beautifully. It’s particularly welcome for the generous sampling of works by two of his composer-friends, John McDonald and Yehudi Wyner.
And finally, the Astra Chorus from Melbourne, Australia gives us an example of exceptional musicianship and adventurous curation. The big news is that they premiere four Morton Feldman works — yes, they’ve never been recorded, and they open up a completely new perspective on his vocal writing. It’s not just Rothko Chapel anymore. The other pieces from Feldman’s contemporaries and still-living composers create stimulating commentary and perspective. And if readers have caught it, yes there is one piece of mine on this program, but it’s only two minutes long, I did not have a hand in its being on the program, they don’t know I’m writing this, and I promise I’d recommend the disc for the Feldman no matter what! I hope what seems like a conflict of interest will be forgiven; new music is a small world.
New Music Buff
I was delighted to receive this disc directly from the composer. I had not been familiar with Harold Meltzer‘s (1966- ) work so this would be my introduction. The disc contains two works, a Piano Quartet (2016) and a song cycle, Variations on a Summer Day (2012-2016). Both are functional titles which tell the listener little about what to expect in terms of style. I was even more delighted when he kindly sent me some PDF scores of these pieces.
The Piano Quartet might be described as post minimal I suppose but the salient characteristic of this piece is that it is exciting and quite listenable. It is also quite a workout for the musicians. In fact this piece seems to embody a variety of styles which give it a friendly romantic gloss at times. This is a fine addition to the Piano Quartet repertoire.
The musicians that do such justice to this composition are: Boston Chamber Music Society: Harumi Rhodes, violin, Dimitri Murrath, viola, Raman Ramakrishnan, violoncello, and Max Levinson, piano. All are kept quite busy and seem to be enjoying themselves. I can’t imagine this not playing well to the average chamber music audience.
The song cycle, “Variations on a Summer Day” sets poetry by Wallace Stevens and Meltzer’s compositional style seems to be a good fit for Stevens’ poetic style. This work is stylistically very similar to the Piano Quartet with hints of minimalism within a larger somewhat romantic style. It is scored for chamber orchestra with soprano solo. Actually the orchestra is Ensemble Sequitur, a group founded in part by the composer and clearly dedicated to the performance of new music. The members of this group include: Abigail Fischer, soprano, Jayce Ogren, conductor, Tara O’Connor and Barry Crawford, flutes, Alan Kay and Vicente Alexim, clarinets, Margaret Kampmeier, piano, Miranda Cuckson and Andrea Schultz, violins, Daniel Panner, viola, Greg Hesselink, violoncello.
The poem is by the sometimes obtuse American poet Wallace Stevens. Maybe “obtuse” is the wrong word but Stevens is not the easiest read. What is interesting is how well this composer’s style fits this poetic utterance. This is a lovely song cycle that puts this writer in the mind of Copland’s Dickinson Songs and Barber’s Hermit Songs and perhaps his Knoxville Summer of 1915. There is an air of romantic nostalgia in this tonal and passionate setting.
Stevens’ poetry has been inspiring American composers for some years. Works like Roger Reynolds’ “The Emperor of Ice Cream” (1961-2) demonstrate an effective avant garde setting of another of his works. It is fascinating to hear how different composers utilize the poet’s work. The present cycle is a beautiful setting which presents a challenge to the musicians which is met quite successfully here.