Harrison Birtwistle: Secret Theater / Tragoedia / Five Distances / Three Settings of Celan - Pierre Boulez / Ensemble InterContemporain
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CD Details
Edition: Music CDCD Release Date: 1996-03-12
Music Label: Deutsche Grammophon
Soundtracks:
- Prologue
- Parados
- Episodion: Strophe I - Anapaest II
- Antistrophe I
- Stasimon
- Episodion: Strophe II - Anapaest II
- Antistrophe II
- Exodus
Music reviews of Harrison Birtwistle: Secret Theater / Tragoedia / Five Distances / Three Settings of Celan - Pierre Boulez / Ensemble InterContemporain
Music Review: Generic modernism with only a few interesting moments.
Rating: 2 Stars
This Deutsche Grammophon collection of four pieces by Harrison Birtwistle, performed by the Ensemble Intercontemporain and Pierre Boulez, was originally released in 1996. In 2001 it got a reissue in a two-disc set in Decca's "The British Music Collection" (making Birtwistle one of the most unlikely composers to appear on Decca), so if you're considering this material, seek out that.
The early "Tragoedia" (1965) is the most interesting of the pieces here. A reference to Greek ceremonies connected to Pan (being literally a goat, trag- song, -oedia), the eight movements of the work follow classical nomenclature, write strophes, anapests, and antistrophes. It moves from soundworld to soundworld along its twenty-minute span, from simple Romanticism to a minimalistic ostinato reminescent of some Reich, to the sort of smooth modernistic textures of later composers like Lindberg. Yet, it's still remarkably coherent.
I wish I such much positive about the other pieces on the disc. "Five Distances" for five instruments (1992), a wind quintet, has nothing especially upsetting, but lacks direction and resembles the generic modernism of Lieberson, or Eotvos as his worst. The "Three Settings of Celan" for ensemble and soprano, here Christine Whittlesey, are taken from a total set of nine such pieces composed between 1989 and 1996, manage to make a poet as intriguing and bizarre as Celan dull and forgettable. Finally, "Secret Theatre" (1984) promises to finally escape this "serialist assembly-line" as a fellow reviewer has called it, and seems to build at something with the low instruments, but never manages.
I must admit this disc doesn't spur me on to discover any more of Birtwistle's work. Rarely am I so disappointed by a composer, but even the goodness of "Tragoedia" doesn't make it worthy of recommendation.
Description of Harrison Birtwistle: Secret Theater / Tragoedia / Five Distances / Three Settings of Celan - Pierre Boulez / Ensemble InterContemporain
A good performance of Birtwistle's Tragoedia for chamber ensemble should be shocking, bristling, hair-raising; Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain perform here as if they're in an elegant 19th-century salon. Everything's in tune, but there's no passion: it's almost breezy. Boulez is more comfortable with the exquisite, transparent moments in the score, which are played beautifully; but that's only one side of the fascinating British composer. Three other works are on the disc, including Secret Theatre and settings of poet Paul Celan. --Joshua CodyGeneral CDs
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