EDWARD TATNALL CANBY
Leedy: Entropical Paradise. Six Sonic Environments Created on the Moog Synthesizer and Buchla Modular Electronic Music System. Seraphim SIC 6060 (3 discs), stereo $8.94.
These new big electronic pieces have one thing in common-they are invariably acclaimed, especially by their own publicity people. But they aren't really all alike. This one is good. Even the "argument," by the composer, is simple and well written, and will convince you if I don't. That's plenty rare! (Most composers write turgid technical poly-syllablic jargon. They'd do better to stick to music.) Sonic environments-exactly. The big point of these six sides is that they do not "go" anywhere, though they constantly change, within a rigid set of parameters, a computer-style program of sounds for each, very limited and yet infinitely varied. It takes awhile for most of us to get out of the old feeling that works of art in time must GROW, must have shape, beginning, end and middle, all somehow inevitably right. That is Germanic dogma, superb for a large area of classical music. But not universal. It took me a good 30 years to find this out for myself! Each side is programmed out of a very few basic sound-variables. These are somehow organized with the intent of infinite randomness, within a pattern.
Now any mathematically inclined reader will know that here is one of the toughest of practicalities! Nothing is harder to generate than true randomness. Nature tends towards entropy.
See? So I find the genuinely random aspects of the patterned sounds in these works quite fascinating in themselves.
Unity and Diversity, that is the old game, newly set forth. The nearest natural equivalent, I'd say, is the sound of water dripping into a bathtub. That is exactly what we have here, in conceptual terms. No beginning, no end, a rigidly circumscribed set of sound parameters-and a superbly fascinating degree of randomness! Only, this might be 50 dripping faucets all at once.
Each side has a type of sound set-up.
Wood-blocky, xylophone sounds in a watery reverb. Popping, twanging sounds, guttural, or like a finger popped out of a mouth, stuttery. Sighing wind sounds, a rising hurricane blast that blows up and dies away, again and again, gales blowing through loose weather stripping, or steam locomotive whistles, mournfully never-ending, like ghosts of an era. Some of it is ugly, demanding. Yet interesting.
You don't have to call it music if you don't want to. The composer says so.
That's helpful. It's like Varese's "organized sound"--but very differently organized, an altogether different world.
I suggest you'll be able to use it nicely to make your own sonic environments.
Just play, like sonic wallpaper. Pretty good wallpaper.
Performance: Ain't none. Sound: A
Village Music of Yugoslavia. (Zagreb Folklore Festival). Nonesuch H-72042, stereo, $ 2.98.
The African Mbira. Music of the Shona People of Rhodesia. Dumisani Abraham Maraire and others. Nonesuch H-72043, stereo, $ 2.98.
Javanese Court Gamelan. Pura Paku Alaman, Jogyakarta, K.R.T. Wasitodipuro. Nonesuch H-2044, stereo, $2.98.
Always keep an eye and an ear on the Nonesuch Explorer releases. They seldom lack interest and the stereo fi, regardless of the locale, is invariably hi.
(That's partly because a lot of them are recorded in the U.S.A. by traveling "natives.") Of these three, oddly, the most Westernized is "The African Mbira." The three Shona people who perform are two students and a professor at, of all places, the University of Washington in Seattle; but this, surely, has little to do with the Western influence so clearly marked in their home music.
Its sound is strikingly like that of the West Indies steel band made out of old oil drums; the instruments clank away, marimba style, with frequent expressive buzzings, accompanied by shaking rattles; the singing too is not too far from the more primitive West Indies sort, but with more repetition of shorter bits. The Western aspect is in the clear harmonies, which at times have an almost "gospel" quality, simple chords and keys like F major. Nice music and a nice jabber of meaningless (to us) Africanese, the whole not a bit the worse for whatever "contamination" it may have suffered. I'd call it, rather, assimilation.
In contrast, the Javenese music is 100 percent Eastern, with not the slightest trace of Western influence.
As always, it is a highly shopisticated, extremely elaborate and formal music, played at length on traditional gamelan instruments-gongs, bells, assorted metal sound producers, these produced in the 17th century for a local prince, whose successor was honored by the music here recorded on the occasion of a birthday broadcast. (Seems the Prince's birthday is celebrated every 35 days.) The instruments in this case are accompanied by numerous voices, solo and women's group, an unusual gamelan facet for those of us who have heard only the instrumental music.
The Javanese music is dutifully and interestingly explained on the jacket, with many references to the various traditional modes and tunings, but all of this will go right over your musical head, of course. Our ears simply are untrained for these complex and ancient ways of hearing. The scales used are clear enough, except that most of the notes will sound "out of tune"; they do not correspond exactly to our Western tones, which seem so "right" to us.
Interesting modalities, such as a long work based on the notes (approximately) F-sharp, G, B, C, D, with the unlikely B-most inappropriate in Western thinking-as the clear tonic, the ending note. Nope, you won't be able to say you get the sense of this music. But you will nevertheless find it interesting and pleasing. Imagine (as you listen) how the Beethoven Fifth might sound to one of these performers! As for the Yugoslays, they preserve a remarkable amount of their ancient village musical traditions which antedate our Western art music by millenia. Some of this recording, of course, is village polka music, more or less, charmingly crude and unsophisticated. But more of it is exotic and Eastern sounding, the voices wailing in that loud, piercing fashion that seems to go with true folk singing everywhere, full of tricky ornamentation and rhythm. One pair of instrumental works (there are primitive oboes, clarinets, guitars, out of the Middle Ages) is carefully played in dissonant parallel seconds and sevenths, a style that is almost too odd to believe.
The promoters here have fallen a bit back into a dishonorable recording tradition: excerpts that are too short and too many. These vary from less than a minute to a bit over three. The music would be better for longer slices, as in most of the other Nonesuch Explorer recordings.
Performances: ?? Sound: B +
Beethoven: Sonatas for Piano and Violin, complete. (1944). Joseph Szigeti, Claudio Arrau. Library of Congress concerts. Vanguard Everyman SRV 300/3 (4 discs), S11.92.
Is it true what they've been saying about Arrau? More than a quarter century later, Arrau has entered the category of famed pianistic elder statesmen, revered far and wide in the music world. Musicians bow down, as have concert audiences. And PR people, too, right and left (following, not leading, as PR always does). Yet, to my own disquiet, I have consistently found the late Arrau's pianism unmusical, cold, hard; I wish I hadn't. Much easier just to worship, along with others! 1944 and a revelation. Marvelous! Now I begin to understand. Arrau was a born pianistic genius, playing big Beethoven at 4 or something. In 1944, here, his Beethoven is absolutely alive, full of bounce and vigor, so much so that, indeed, the wise Szigeti, one of the top fiddlers of the day, quietly gives him first place without batting a fiddler's eyelid. True, there are a few intense passages, in the "Kreuzer," where the later and harder Arrau is perceptible.
But mostly he sounds like another Rudolph Serkin, all tremendous bounce, personality, projection. Somehow, this is the way the young Beethoven must have played. With this sort of keyboard charisma.
In comparison, Bartók's "Kreutzer" Sonata of only four years earlier, in the same hall, with the same violinist, is not really a performing success. It is a composers' performance, as composers go in this modern age. I know-Bartók was a celebrated pianist. But for my ear, in the telltale Library of Congress Beethoven, he plays like a 20th century corn poser. That is, he plays with brilliance (he had the fingers) and immense conviction, but with that curious inner drama that says, somehow-If only this durned instrument would say what I want it to say! It never quite does. Bartók was too big for his own fingers, at least in his conception of Beethoven. The fingers were plenty quick, but the mind was still quicker, and fell over itself trying to convert ideas to physical sound. Only on paper did Bartók really get down everything he felt. And, of course, in playing his own music.
Don't ask me why Arrau is not now, for my ears, what he was in these 1944 recordings. Don't ask anybody, because you'll get nowhere. His fame is set and that is that.
Performance: A, Sound: C
Songs of Debussy. Anna Moffo; Jean Casadesus, pf. RCA LSC 3225, stereo, $ 5.98
All these musical eggs in one basket--and not a crack to be found in any of them, for my ear. 'That is because the two artists involved here are both of them sensitive, understanding, and musical. That's what you need. Also, of course, you need very careful engineering, to balance the big piano against a voice that must range from very loud to very soft, all over the place. RCA's people have done this job nobly.
Moffo's voice is a trace heavy for Debussy but the French styling of her delivery is remarkably good and her ear for exact pitch is absolutely superb, as is her control of the often-difficult high passages and the large leaps.
She gives you a fine feeling of confidence, that nothing is going to go wrong, or be embarrassing, or grossly loud, or fuzzy and diffuse. And Jean Casadesus plays as though born to Debussy, which in a way he was.
Last, but not least (Angel, please take note), there is a big booklet with all the texts, in French and English.
Oh yes, one little fault in the production. Alan Rich's good comments on the various groups of songs are useless, for many listeners, because there is no identification, on the jacket or the disc, except by individual title! Silly oversight. You can always get out your big music dictionary and look them up, one by one.
Performance: A, Sound: A
Peter Rabbit and Tales of Beatrix Potter. Original soundtrack music from the Royal Ballet Film. Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Lanchbery. Angel S-36789, stereo, $ 5.98.
The film from which this music comes is by now very well known, what with frequent showings and massive attendant publicity in the big mags--pictures in color of those human sized ultra-realistic animals, pigs, mice, frogs, squirrels and, of course Peter Rabbit himself, all going through their graceful dance routines. Probably half suffocated inside those masks. But of the music, not having seen/heard the film, I knew not a thing. Nobody was talking. Whose music? What sort? Well, it says here that it was "composed and scored" by John Lanchbery, who is the conductor. So it must be, but what it adds up to in the listening is a kind of parallel to all the typical ballet music of the mid-19th century you ever heard, and pleasantly so. All very pre-Tchaikovsky, more out of Gounod or a mild Delibes, very mild.
Just how much of it is pure imitation by John Lanchbery, whether any of the music is transcribed from works of that period (scored, as the ascription has it), is not too clear. I recognized the style, but not the tunes, though I admit I got a bit absentminded, here and there, and might have missed a familiar old clinker. In any case, none of the numbers are identified except by the dance title.
All of which means that you may buy this disc (a) as a bit of harmless old-fashioned-style background music, or (b) if you have seen the film, to remind you of same. Either way it's quite OK. Performance: B, Sound: B
Brahms: Hungarian Dances, Waltzes Op. 39. Schubert: Marche Militaire; Fantasia in F Minor. Richard and John Contiguglia, duo-pianists. Connoisseur Soc. CS 2037, stereo, $ 5.98.
This is the finest disc of two-piano Brahms and Schubert since Stereo! In my memory, only the team of Demus and Badura-Skoda, on old mono Westministers, could possibly compare in the truthfulness and beauty of this Schubert, as here put forth. And I never remember hearing Brahms like this! Not on discs, anyhow. I played the whole damn thing three times through.
These two young men, out of Yale University, are that rare phenomenon, a two-piano team that plays music, not just brilliantly coordinated pianism.
They are indeed superbly coordinated, almost beyond belief. But what comes out makes one forget the pianos. And think of the composer himself. They have such a beautiful sense for phrasing, for rhythm, for the exactly perfect tempo. And they play, truly, as one.
Though I haven't liked Connoisseur's one-piano recording, a too-reverberant church sound, I find no fault whatsoever with this larger sound of two grand pianos together. It suits both the music and the performers.
Performance: A, Sound: B+
(Audio magazine, Feb. 1972; Edward Tatnall Canby)
More music articles and reviews from AUDIO magazine.
= = = =