Perle: Piano Concerto 2; Six Etudes for Solo Piano / Danielpour: Metamorphosis for Piano and Orchestra
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CD Details
Edition: Music CDFormat: Import
CD Release Date: 1995-01-24
Music Label: Harmonia Mundi Fr.
Music reviews of Perle: Piano Concerto 2; Six Etudes for Solo Piano / Danielpour: Metamorphosis for Piano and Orchestra
Music Review: Perle is not immediately appealing, but highly rewarding; Danielpour is the opposite
Rating: 4 Stars
George Perle dubbed his compositional method "twelve-tone tonality", but if you don't know the music, don't be deluded: it is NOT tonal music, at least in the accepted sense. If I understand the various liner notes and other articles found on the net, Perle's "twelve-tone tonality" is a way of organizing the hierarchies between pitches, using some pitches as referential anchors, analogous to the hierarchies used earlier in tonal music and arising from the natural properties of the twelve semi-tones; but in the works featured here as well as in others I've recently heard of this composer, those hierarchies do NOT result in music that sounds anything like tonal.
In fact, Perle's Second Piano Concerto from 1992, a Koussevitzky Music Foundation commission, sounds (to my ears) very Schoenbergian, but with a jauntisness, playfulness, liveliness, exuberance and unpredictability that are uniquely the composer's own. The liner notes contend that, despite his abiding love for the piano, Perle waited 1990 and his First Piano Concerto (available on George Perle: Orchestral Works) to attend to the genre of the Piano Concerto. This is only partly true, as Perle did compose two pieces that in all but name were Concertos for Piano and Chamber Orchestra - very much like Berg's Kammerkonzert and Janacek's Concertino and Capriccio: the Concertino from 1979 and the Serenade No. 3 for Piano and Chamber Ensemble from 1983 (see my review of Richard Goode's recording, George Perle: Serenade No. 3; Ballade; Concertino).
The Second Piano Concerto shares many of the same characteristics, but if possible goes further in the direction of that exuberance, playfulness and whimsical unpredictability that seem to be the composer's trademarks. Like its predecessors it is not particularly appealing melodically, but it constantly arouses interest and even glee in the wealth and imagination of its sonic events, its unexpected twists and turns, its motoric and bouncy exuberance.
The Six Etudes from 1973-76, along with their sequel the Six New Etudes from 1984 (played by the same Michal Boriskin on George Perle: Piano Works), are Perle's magnum opus for solo piano. In their systematic exploration of a specific technical and/or music difficulty, they evoke Debussy's Etudes, with which they share a common terseness and whimsicality. But Perle's harmonic and melodic language is of course much more angular and craggy than Debussy's. Here as in the Piano Concerto Boriskin, long associated with the composer, is impressive. As with the Piano Concerto, this is not music you would call melodically or tonally appealing, and Perle isn't an innovator in piano sounds like, say, Crumb, but the digital imagination is constantly ear-catching, in a demanding way.
Richard Danielpour's Metamorphosis is his First Piano Concerto (to date he has written two more, in 1993 and 2002). It had a long gestation: it was begun in 1987 as a Piano Quintet and completed in its final form only in 1992. It is also appealing, I guess; but the confrontation with Perle's Piano Concerto only serves to highlight how lacking it true originality it is and how much it strives for facile effect. In it you hear much that was already said by the major American symphonists of the 1930s to 1960s, like Schuman, Copland, Barber or Mennin (the latter one of Danielpour's teachers by the way). In the dynamism, the rhythmic vigor, the syncopated muscularity of its outer movements, the brooding wistfulness turning into anguished drama of the second movement, it is music that could have been written in the 1950s by a none too daring composer. And the string glissandos on harmonics that Danielpour obviously loves so much that he strews them all over seem straight out of Villa Lobos. It is also quite pretentious: obviously for Danielpour it isn't enougth to compose just an Allegro - Adagio -Allegro. So the composition's three movements are supposed to express "a transformation of the soul" through the "time-honored... (re the liner notes, by pianist Michael Boris.kin himself; isn't that a synonym for "stale"?) ...idea of death/redemption/rebirth"and three movements that are titled "Annunciation", "Atonement" and "Apotheosis" - just fancy names and conceited concept for fast-slow-fast, if you ask me. The second movement has some dramatic impact in its own "time-honored"manner but, at almost 13-minutes, it seems too long for its basic material.
The music of Perle may be more demanding, less immediately striving for immediate success and appeal, but ultimately more rewarding, I find.
Excellent and informative liner notes, and Boriskin is always impressive. TT 60+ minutes.
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