BMOP Surveys Shapero’s Orchestral Works

courtesy of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project

According to my records my last encounter with a recording by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) was its album consisting entirely of orchestra music by Leon Kirchner, released in September of 2018. Kirchner was very much a “Boston-based” composer, having joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1961 and remained there until 1989. This past Friday BMOP released its latest album, this one devoted entirely to orchestral compositions by Harold Shapero. Shapero, who was about a year younger than Kirchner, was even more “Boston-based,” having been born in Lynn, Massachusetts and educated at Harvard. He began teaching at Brandeis University in 1951, and his tenure lasted for 37 years. His most notable student during that period was probably John Adams.

Shapero was known as a neoclassicist, and that reputation has been reinforced by the titles of three of the selections on the new BMOP album: sinfonia, partita, and serenade. I encountered him a couple of times during my student years in Cambridge, but he was very much out of fashion with the prevailing trends of many of the students and teachers I encountered. Basically, “out of fashion” meant failing to take the insights of Anton Webern to a higher level (a goal that, in retrospect, now seems little more than just plain silly).

Shapero’s neoclassicism was not just about returning to the structural foundations of the past. It also entailed clearly-defined melodic content and traditional harmonic progressions. The “neo” emerged from new approaches to thematic contours and more “modernist” approaches to instrumentation. The works on this new album cover a period from 1945 (when Igor Stravinsky was the high-profile advocate of neoclassicism) to 1960 (when even Stravinsky had begun to flirt with serial techniques).

Each of the five works performed is delivered with an unabashedly positive rhetoric. With the exception of the 1955 “Credo,” the rhetoric is downright joyous. There is even more than a little prankishness in “On Green Mountain,” which takes the theme-and-variations foundation of a chaconne by Claudio Monteverdi and scores it with a jazz ensemble. This was composed in 1957, when Gunther Schuller’s “third stream” techniques were intellectualizing new approaches to making jazz to such a degree that the very foundations of jazz were in danger of being undermined. If Shapero’s domain was neoclassicism, “On Green Mountain” made it clear that he knew how to swing far better than Schuller did.

I have previously written about having attended the first performance of John Adams’ “Grand Pianola Music” in New York. While much of the audience was appreciative, there was an unmistakable sector that made their hostility clearly known to all present for the occasion. That hostility was probably directed at Adams’ determination to have fun with the good-old-fashioned dominant-tonic harmonic progression. As I mentioned above, Adams was Shapero’s pupil; and I would not be surprised if he had encountered “On Green Mountain.” In some ways “Grand Pianola Music” escalated the idea behind “On Green Mountain” to a more raucous level, where Shapero’s joyousness had metamorphosed into unabashed prankishness.

Adams may have “shocked the system” with the premise that a concert listening experience could be fun; but the foundation for that premise can be found in the Shapero selections on this new album.