Category: Music

New York-based composer Harold Meltzer (b. 1966) has received significant attention in the past few years; in addition to a Guggenheim Fellowship and a residency at the American Academy in Rome, he was awarded the 2008 Barlow Endowment Prize (to compose a new string quartet) and was one of two Pulitzer Prize finalists in 2009 (for Brion). Though Meltzer began his career as a composer (studying at Cambridge and Yale), he took a brief detour to law school; after practicing law for several years, he returned exclusively to music. He has since worked as a freelance composer in New York City, founded the Sequitur new music ensemble, and is now a faculty member at Vassar College. If Meltzer was even half as good a lawyer as he is a composer, he was a great loss to the legal field; regardless, I am extremely pleased that he was “reclaimed” by music!

Though Meltzer’s work has been performed with frequency, this is the first CD devoted entirely to it and is thus a very welcome release. The most notable property of Meltzer’s musical language is an extensive use of ear-catching and unusual timbres. However, these timbres are always deployed in the service of a compelling musical argument; there is never the sense of “sound effects.” Meltzer also tends to focus, at any given time, on a subset of instruments from the larger ensemble of a given work. The overall result is a very personal blend of immediate lucidness and sonic creativity that produces an extremely compelling result.

Distinctive timbres are demonstrated very well in the disc’s opening work, Brion (2008), which is scored for the unusual configuration of the Cygnus Ensemble: two plucked instruments (in this case guitar and mandolin), flute, oboe, violin, and cello. The piece is inspired by the Brion-Vega cemetery (near Venice), the 1970s work of Italian architect Carlo Scarpia. In the booklet notes, Meltzer describes the form of the piece (which consists of three movements of uneven length: 6:13, 10:33, 1: 00) as mimicking his visit to the cemetery: “I explored much of it for an hour, took a break, then went back in for another spell, almost twice as long, seeing the things I hadn’t seen and retracing my steps to some of the places I’d seen before. Then, after a second break, I had a last look around.” It is an extremely beautiful and often very delicate piece.

Despite using a single accompanying instrument (cello), the striking Two Songs from Silas Marner (2000–01) abound in colorful sounds. For the first movement, the cello plays almost entirely in harmonics; in the second, an interlocking two-voice cello texture (sounding often like a viola and cello in duet) is created through extensive use of double-stopping. Though the smallest work on the disc, it is my personal favorite. Sindbad (2003), an extended work for narrator and piano trio, uses excerpts from a short story by Donald Barthelme as its text; Barthelme’s story tells of a hapless night-college professor who imagines himself as the Sindbad of legend. Works with narrator are notoriously hard to write effectively, but Meltzer achieves admirable integration of the story’s drama with the music; he employs a vignette-like musical structure, in which an array of striking musical ideas pass by extremely quickly but never get in the way of the recitation. Exiles (2001) is a diptych for tenor and ensemble based on a poem of Conrad Aitken and a translation from the Chinese by Hart Crane. The work is largely dark and elegiac in tone.

The performances are all superb. The Cygnus Ensemble has long distinguished itself as one of New York’s finest new-music ensembles (and has brought about a remarkable amount of excellent music for its unusual configuration). The other fine performers include NYC new-music mainstays like Elizabeth Farnum, Gregory Hesselink, and James Baker. Sindbad is narrated by the very distinguished English bass-baritone John Shirley-Quirk, now retired from singing, but thankfully still performing. This disc presents an excellent introduction to Harold Meltzer’s work, and it is music that is well worth hearing indeed. Carson Cooman

This article originally appeared in Issue 34:4 (Mar/Apr 2011) of Fanfare Magazine.

“Professor Bad Trip” is Fausto Romitelli’s most ecstatic plunge into psychedelia and spectralism. The Doors meet -– and unapologetically drown out -– Pierre Boulez. Completed in 2000, an Italian composer’s nearly 45-minute confrontation between chaos and control forecast a millennium that no one else was quite ready to acknowledge.

A decade later, we know better, and on Monday Los Angeles’ doors finally opened for this particular professor and his bad trip. With wa-wa-ing electric guitar and all, the West Coast premiere of the full score was the major event of the Argento Chamber Ensemble program at Monday Evening Concerts in the Colburn School’s Zipper Concert Hall.

Romitelli, who was born in 1963, was a curious character on the European new music scene. He somewhat followed in Esa-Pekka Salonen’s footsteps, studying in Milan with Franco Donatoni, then moving on to Boulez’s new music center, IRCAM, in Paris.

Only Romitelli did this five years after Salonen, and by then Donatoni had become musically radicalized and bit wacko. Meanwhile, IRCAM had turned into a hotbed of spectralism, using the science of acoustics and the music research facility’s computers to cook up intoxicating harmonic resonances.

Throw into the mix a professor Timothy Leary leaning toward drugs, mysticism, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the music of the Jim Morrison and the more current club culture, and Romitelli briefly became the rocker of the moderns. And like many of his hipster idols, Romitelli died too early, at 41 (after a long battle with cancer), to complete his vision.

The scoring is for a fairly normal 10-member ensemble of strings, winds and percussion along electric guitar and electric bass. Cellist Jay Campbell had a spectacular moment in Lesson 2 when he put down his acoustic instrument, took up an electric cello and made like Jimi Hendrix. The pianist had a smaller electric keyboard on top of her grand. Harmonicas and kazoos were part of the mix. And a mix it was. Extensive electronics are required and the hall was surrounded by loudspeakers.

The sound is often distorted and ugly but fascinating, a little reminiscent of the controlled craziness and crazy control of Miles Davis in the ’70s. But Romitelli’s grit, especially his rubbing together unearthly spectral harmonies into electronic dirt, was all his own and something to hear.

The first half of the concert was pristine and demonstrated just how good are the members of Argento, which is conducted by Michel Galante. Carol McGonnell was the elastic, exacting, stupendous soloist in Brian Ferneyhough’s highly complicated mini clarinet concerto, “La Chute d’Icare” (The Fall of Icarus). At the other extreme she was a study in soporific eeriness in Salvatore Sciarrino’s clarinet solo “Let Me Die Before I Wake,” a repetitious, unpleasant reflection on euthanasia.

Three tiny pieces by Gérard Pesson with long French titles were alluring. In one -– “La Lumière n’a pas de Bras pour nous Porter” (Light Has No Arms With Which to Bear Us) –- pianist Joanna Chao rhythmically slapped the keys with only an occasional piano note sounding in the process. This is a fresh and exciting composer all but unknown in the United States. Monday evening was a night of news.

— Mark Swed

Photo: Top, the Argento Chamber Ensemble at Zipper Concert Hall Monday night; below, clarinetist Carol McGonnell. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times.