The Mixed Results of Larcher’s Latest Album

Cover of the album to be released this Friday (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

My first encounter with the music of Thomas Larcher took place in July of 2010, when I wrote a piece for Examiner.com about the release of the ECM New Series CD Madhares. This was a time when I was particularly interested in composers exploring the nature of sonorities, and that interest was reinforced in April of 2011, when Osmo Vänskä led the San Francisco Symphony in the world premiere performance of Larcher’s “Red and Green.” This coming Friday will see the latest ECM release of an album devoted entirely to Larcher’s compositions. The title of the album is The Living Mountain, which is also the title of the first of the three compositions on the disc. Amazon.com has created a digital download Web page for this album, which will be enabled on Friday. The audio CD is listed as an option; but, as of this writing, that option has not yet been enabled, at least not for advance purchase.

The album is framed by settings of texts for both the first at last selections. It begins with The Living Mountain, which was scored for the Munich Chamber Orchestra with solo parts taken by soprano (Sarah Aristidou), piano (Aaron Pilsan), and accordion (Luka Juhart). The conductor is Clemens Schuldt. The texts are taken from The Living Mountain, a memoir by Nan Shepherd, written in the Forties reflecting on her walks through the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland. The concluding selection is Unerzählt (untold), setting thirteen brief texts by W. G. Sebald. This is a (somewhat) more conventional song cycle, scored for baritone (Andrè Schuen) and Daniel Heide (piano). Between these two compositions, Schuldt conducts “Ouroboros,” scored for cello and chamber orchestra with Alisa Weilerstein on cello and Pilsan again on piano.

I have been following Weilerstein’s work for quite some time, even before I made the transition from Silicon Valley researcher to writing about music. Where writing is concerned, my interest in her dates back to June of 2008, when she performed Antonín Dvořák's Opus 104 cello concerto in B minor with the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas. Where her interest in contemporary music is concerned, in April of 2010, she performed Lera Auerbach’s Opus 47 set of preludes for cello and piano in a San Francisco Performances recital in which Auerbach was her accompanist. When it comes to challenges out on the “bleeding edge” of modernism, Weilerstein is unabashedly fearless; and her passionate intensity can be found again in her performance of “Ouroboros.”

Sadly, neither of the vocal selections come across as equally convincing. One possibility may be that the texts being set are so overloaded with semantics that the music comes across as little more than secondary accompaniment. This is particularly evident in The Living Mountain, suggesting that setting relatively brief reflections in English was not in Larcher’s comfort zone. In this case the result is a song cycle that is rich in instrumental sonorities that reduce the text to a “secondary experience.” Similarly, Unerzählt comes across as more interested in syllabic sonorities than in any of the semantic impressions Sebald had selected to evoke. Nevertheless, this is definitely an album that Weilerstein enthusiasts will not want to miss.