If my search engine is behaving properly, composer George Rochberg has not shown up on this site since March of 2022. On that occasion, his setting of Psalm 150 was performed by the San Francisco Choral Artists; and this turned out to be my latest missed opportunity to listening to his music. Mind you, this did not surprise me. Rochberg was in the Music Department at the University of Pennsylvania at the time that I was teaching computer science there (and hanging out with the early music crowd in my spare time); and I never once saw the man, let alone had an opportunity to listen to any of his compositions.
Guitarist Laura Lootens performing her arrangement of one of George Rochberg’s “Caprice Variations,” composed for solo violin (from a YouTube video released by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts)
I was thus pleasantly surprised this morning to learn that I would be able to sample his efforts through yesterday’s release of a new YouTube video by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. This was the latest performance by an Omni guitarist of music not originally composed for guitar. “Caprice Variations” was composed by Rochberg for unaccompanied violin as a “response” to the call of the solo violin Caprice compositions by Niccolò Paganini. On this new video, guitarist Laura Lootens performs the second of those variations.
I was more than a little disappointed that this variation should be taken out of context. Indeed, Rochberg’s music is performed so seldom that anyone encountering Lootens’ performance through “blind listening” would probably guess that the music was composed by someone else! To be fair, however, listening to this one variation puts the composer at a disadvantage. Consider the text provided on the YouTube Web page for this performance:
George Rochberg’s Caprice Variations for solo, unaccompanied violin, written in 1970 were built as a large set of character variations on Paganini’s well-known Caprice No. 24. Rochberg uses the famous Paganini theme as a kind of “laboratory” to move through sharply contrasting historical styles and expressive worlds in a virtuosic display, making the piece both a technical tour de force and a statement about tradition and modern musical language.
It is next to impossible to even guess what “came out of the laboratory” by listening to only a single variation!
That said, Lootens delivered a well-polished account of that second variation in Presto tempo; but any serious listener deserves an opportunity to listen to Rochberg’s composition in its entirety!
No comments:
Post a Comment