Earlier this month Starkland released the album Music for Large Ensemble, featuring two compositions by Tim Brady. Brady does double duty on this album, playing solo electric guitar in “Désir,” his concerto for electric guitar and large chamber ensemble conducted by Cristian Gort, and then conducting his orchestral song cycle Eight Songs about: Symphony #7. Allan Kozinn has described Brady’s work as “entirely of his time, which is to say, eclectically rooted in the full range of modern styles, from neo-Romanticism to experimentalism and Minimalism, to say nothing of the great art-rock tradition that informs some of his guitar lines.”
Brady’s guitar virtuosity is almost immediately apparent at the very beginning of his concerto’s first of three movements, which are played without interruption. As often happens when a virtuoso soloist writes music for himself (think of Niccolò Paganini), the solo work tends to rule over the ensemble accompaniment. However, while Paganini required that the orchestra do little more than amble its way through the concerto’s themes, Brady expects his accompanists to follow his breakneck pace and keep up with the twists and turns of his eccentric rhythms. Since that accompaniment was written for a one-to-a-part chamber orchestra, the performance itself tends to reflect a madcap approach to jamming, even when the players are following the specifics of the notation.
The title of the song cycle is a bit enigmatic. The symphony is Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 60 (seventh), which was given the title “Leningrad.” This symphony was completed in December 1941, a time when the city of Leningrad had been under siege by the Nazis for about three months. (The siege would continue until the end of January of 1944.) The work would be given its first performance in Leningrad on August 9, 1942, apparently at the request of Joseph Stalin. As the Wikipedia entry for that performance notes, the work “was performed by the surviving musicians of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, supplemented with military performers. Most of the musicians were suffering from starvation, which made rehearsing difficult: musicians frequently collapsed during rehearsals, and three died.”
The texts of the songs, by Douglas Smith, give voice to Josef Stalin, Nina Varzar, wife of Shostakovich, citizens of Leningrad, a German soldier in the trenches, a prostitute, performers in the orchestra (two songs), and conductor Karl Eliasberg. On this recording they are sung by soprano Sarah Albu and baritone Vincent Ranallo. In theory this song cycle promises to be a fascinating perspective on a particularly dark time during World War II. Unfortunately, practice is another matter.
Part of the problem may have to do with distance from the subject matter. While Smith is an award-winning historian specializing in the history of Russia, he was born in 1962. This puts him at a significant distance from not only World War II but also the Soviet Union itself. Brady was born in 1956, putting him somewhat closer to the “historical source.” However, he was never as close to the siege as Shostakovich was. Indeed, the Soviet authorities circulated a photograph of Shostakovich serving as a fireman in in Leningrad 1942:
from a post by Anna Aslanyan on the London Review of Books blog
Thus, while Smith’s texts are well-chosen, it is unclear how much Brady really appreciated what was happening in Leningrad, what Shostakovich was doing at that time, and why he was doing it. The result is music that sounds more like an intellectual exercise than a reflection of one of the darkest times of World War II translated into music by a composer with direct experience of that darkness.
No comments:
Post a Comment