Var?se - The Complete Works / Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra ? Asko Ensemble ? Chailly
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CD Details
Edition: Music CDCD Release Date: 1998-09-15
Music Label: Decca
Soundtracks:
- Chanson de l?-haut
- La Croix du Sud
- Octandre: Assez lent
- Octandre: Tr?s vif et nerveux
- Octandre: Grave - Anim? et jubilatoire
- 1st episode
- 1st interpolation of organised sound
- 2nd episode
- 2nd interpolation
- 3rd episode
- 3rd interpolation
- 4th episode
Music reviews of Var?se - The Complete Works / Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra ? Asko Ensemble ? Chailly
Music Review: Good Production, Now Where's the Simonovich Reissue?
Rating: 4 Stars
Varese was always frustrated by interpretations of his works and longed for the day when he could electronically produce his music, directly realizing his compositions exactly as he intended them. Theoretically that leaves us two works--Poeme Electronique and the tape interpolations on Deserts--as reference points. I suppose it would be simple-minded to turn exclusively to these works for guidance in how Varese should be played, but I can't help but refer to them myself because the tape interpolations on Deserts were what got me hooked on Varese in the first place. Unlike many here, I never was much of a Zappa fan and didn't even know he listened to Varese. No, my pop music idol was Hendrix, and it was easy to move from Hendrix's long feedback solos to the electronic portions of Deserts.
Anyway, my preference in Varese performances is for big, sonorous, lyrical, and passionate productions like Chailly's. They seem truer to the spirit of Varese's electronic works than the drier, intellectualized performances of Boulez. For me, the gold standard in Varese recordings is Konstantin Simonovich and the Paris Contemporary Music Ensemble, an Angel disc that appears to be out of print (Deserts, Ionisation, Integrales, Density 21.5). It combines precision with rich sound and a somewhat languid pace--true to Varese's desire to have his music flow like a river, with various currents moving at differing speeds.
Unfortunately, on the Chailly disc the production of Poeme Electronique is strangely flat--as noted by another reviewer here. Compared to the version on the Columbia disc "The Varese Album", now re-issued, the problem seems to be that the Chailly version has greatly cut down on the echo--or digital delay, or whatever the term is for the gizmo that creates ambience and gives one the impression of being in a very resonant, "live" room. This piece was composed for performance in a concrete-shell building with 400 speakers lining the ceiling, allowing the sounds to move around and intersect--the ultimate in Varese's concept of music as sound sculpture in space. He was also fond of room ambience, hearing it as though the sounds were detaching themselves from their source and floating freely in the space. The version on the Chailly disc may be truer to what was actualy played, because the building itself provided a lot of ambience, but it sounds really dry and anemic here. There's nothing wrong with adapting a tape piece for home phono performance by fattening up the ambience to simulate what it sounds like in live performance; and so I would recommend the Columbia disc for its offering of Poeme Electronique (but not much else, unfortunately--to me, the performances sound rushed, dry, and indifferent).
A couple of other quibbles with the Chailly production: I agree with others here that there are parts which get lost in the shuffle and some better clarity would be nice; and the flute player on Density 21.5 completely misses the concept, in the middle of the piece, that the sound is supposed to come from the keys of the flute being tapped down hard--in other words, the flute becomes a percussion instrument--rather than from the player's breath. But on the whole I find the Chailly recording to be very satisfying.
By the way, I've enjoyed reading a lot of the reviews here. Not the kind of thing people typically chat about at cocktail parties, and I'm afraid I may have developed Varese tunnel vision with my dedication to the Simonovich recording; so I'm glad to share the the differing perspectives I've found here.
Description of Var?se - The Complete Works / Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra ? Asko Ensemble ? Chailly
For a composer who is (now) recognizably part of the 20th-century classical canon, the French ?migr? Edgard Var?se's output was astoundingly meager. Just 15 compositions from his entire life (he destroyed the compositions from his early years, and was a merciless editor of his own material in general) made it out to the listening world. Var?se was caught in the chasm between the music of yesterday and the music of tomorrow: scoring music for modified theremin, steamboat whistles, or air sirens, all balanced with the force of a large orchestra; writing pieces based on the flows of water and wind because that's what shapes the earth; using the concepts of chemical reactions and specific gravity as a basis for his music. Using extremes of contrast, dissonance, and variety in sound, Var?se's pieces had power in the way he attacked and shaped the sound he imagined. From Ionisation (1929), scored almost entirely for unpitched percussion, to the electronic-only, three-dimensionally produced Poeme Electronique (1958), he's provided a foundation that many genres, musicians, and composers were to build from not only for the next 40 years, but inevitably beyond. --Robin EdgertonOctets CDs
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