Earth Dances/Panic
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CD Details
Composer: H. BirtwistleConductor: Christoph von Dohnanyi
Orchestra: Cleveland Orchestra
Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1999-05-24
Music Label: Decca Special Imports
Soundtracks:
- Panic - John Harle/Paul Clarvis
- Earth Dances - The Cleveland Orch/Christoph Von Dohnanyi
Music reviews of Earth Dances/Panic
Music Review: Some reasons for the white-livered to panic, indeed
Rating: 5 Stars
"Panic", Birtwistle's Saxophone Concerto, was met with a gigantic uproar when it was premiered on the Last Night of the Proms on September 16, 1995 - the first piece of contemporary music ever to have appeared on that occasion - and broadcast to an audience of millions of viewers on the BBC 1. No wonder. Imagine the wildest and most piercing solos of free Jazz Saxophone and add to that a violently pounding and seemingly cacophonous large symphony orchestra, and you'll get something like Panic. The piece is conceived as an evocation of the God Pan (or Dyonisus), and the words of the English poet from the Victorian era Elizabeth Barrett Browning that preface the score are telling: "What was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river? Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river." As with about all the music of Birtwistle, it is forbidding, rugged, aggressive, not seductive, but unquestionably impressive. There were good reasons for the unprepared public of that Last Night of the Proms to panic, indeed. So be prepared.
Completed in 1986, "Earth Dances" signalled the composer's return to writing for the large symphony orchestra, 14 years after his "Triumph of Time" (1972) which first brought him to wider public attention. In Earth Dances, he developed and brought a few steps further some compositional processes first essayed in his piece for ensemble Secret Theatre from 1984. He divides the orchestra in six different groups, assembled by instrumental register (violins and upper winds, lower strings and brass etc. - although there are shifts of instruments between the different groups), each assigned a different layer or "stratum" of material, some linear and melodic, some vertical (which I assume refers to chordal pounding). Theses six strata aren't present continuously but appear and reappear, come to the fore and fade into the background. It is the shifting relationships of the strata that generate the work's prodigious and often violent surface energy - making the Earth "dance". The piece exemplifies Birtwistle's fascination with the musical piece as an "object" to be considered from different vantage points, as a rock or crystal observed from different angles, rather (re the notes) than the "organic", goal-directed linearity of traditional Western music.
"Earth Dances" is massive, menacing, forbidding, eliciting a sense of awesome power, at times pent-up, at times unleashed. As its title implies, It evokes the massive telluric processes that have shaped and reshaped the earth's surface ever since the formation of the planet. Again, the music is impressive rather than seductive. Although there are melodic lines (thorny and tormented), the piece is less about melody than about violence, matter, processes.
Dohnanyi's sonics are much more present and vivid than those afforded to the premiere recording, by the BBC SO under Peter Eötvös (Birtwistle: Earth Dances), and the orchestra has more bite. In 2004 DG released another version on their 20/21 series (making it one of the composer's most recorded pieces), with the Ensemble Modern Orchestra conducted by Boulez, and for reasons unknown it took four years to get a listing on this website: Birtwistle: Theseus Game, Earth Dances. I'll review it soon.
Excellent notes. TT 55:20. This disc has been reissued , complemented with the composer's Trumpet Concerto "Endless Parade" (Endless Parade: Trumpet Concertos by Birtwistle / Maxwell Davies / Blake Watkins) and with Boulez' DG disc of pieces for ensemble (Harrison Birtwistle: Secret Theater / Tragoedia / Five Distances / Three Settings of Celan - Pierre Boulez / Ensemble InterContemporain), on a convenient 2 CD set from Decca's British Music Collection (The British Music Collection: Harrison Birtwistle).
More Earth Dances/Panic free music reviews:
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