Arnold Rosner
        Chamber Music

* Sextet for Strings Nun komm' der Heiden Heiland, op. 47 (1970, rev. 1997)
* Besos sin cuento, op. 86 (1989)
* Sonata for Trombone and Piano, op. 106 (1996)

Sestetto Agosto.  Julia Bentley, voice; Pinotage.  Gregory Erickson,
trombone; Angelina Tallaj, piano.
Albany TROY553  TT: 63:19

Summary for the Busy Executive: More good news.

The poet Ezra Pound once wrote that poetry is news that stays news.  I
tend to think of all classic art that way.  As a teen, I remember reading
an account of the premiere of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra -- how
most of the audience was convinced that they had heard a classic.  Since
then, that feeling has occasionally visited me.  A work I like and admire
-- Adams's extraordinary violin concerto or Lutoslawski's Partita, for
example -- won't necessarily trigger the sensation.  It's as if a work
strikes a little chime, and the white noise of living momentarily gets
swept away for one clear, immensely gratifying instant.  The chime went
off, for example, when I first heard Verdi's Requiem, Bach's English
Suites, Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia, and of course some others.
I can't claim that such works have revealed the Meaning of Life, since
they don't give rise to cosmic thoughts or even words.  Furthermore,
it's dangerous for listeners to put their trust in that sort of feeling
as somehow universally meaningful.  After all, it may simply come down
to a matter of you liking the piece so much, you can't imagine why anyone
wouldn't.  I must admit, for example, that not only did the bell ring
once upon a time for a work as turgid as Bloch's America (certainly
enjoyable, although I doubt its most fervent admirer would claim it an
indispensable icon of the musical canon), but for decades it failed to
ring for Beethoven's Eroica Symphony.  At any rate, Arnold Rosner has
rung the bell for me as much as any composer.  A typical Rosner work
becomes instantly and deeply important to me, and I know I'll be listening
to it for many years to come.

Rosner strikes me as a kind of throwback.  Although a relatively young
man (almost exactly a year older than me, as it turns out), I don't think
of him as writing Contemporary Music, because few postwar devices show
up and because of the way the music moves -- that is, in clear, definite
phrases, with the pulse more or less regular and neither swamp-slow or
photon-fast.  On the other hand, he's not trying to raise the dead either.
He's not dressing up as Mahler or Copland or Brahms.  He seems to have
more in common with the Classic Moderns than with today's young Turks
or alte kocker, in that he's not looking for the next new thing, but
rather, in the words of Pound, to "make it new."

You can hear other composers in Rosner's music -- Hindemith, Hovhaness,
Bloch, occasionally Vaughan Williams.  However, you can hear other
composers in just about everybody's music (almost nobody creates entirely
from scratch), and Rosner's mix becomes a personal and strongly individual
voice.  For those who care (and I don't particularly), the music is tonal
rather than atonal.  Quartal harmonies and the old modes -- some from
the Renaissance, some from Middle Eastern music -- fascinate the composer.
There's a very strong intellectual component to the music as well; it's
like watching a bridge rubber or chess battle working itself out.  The
counterpoint goes beyond the merely brilliant.  It often downright
astonishes.  Scorcese and Altman, for example, make good, even great
movies, but Spielberg is technically so far beyond either that he seems
to play a completely different game.  I consider Rosner as complex a
contrapuntalist as Hindemith and Carter.  Yet, as with those two, the
technique is never the point.  Rosner wants, above all, to move his
listeners.  In fact, I consider his greatest talent as a composer the
ability to imagine the unfolding of great emotional impact.  The technique
is simply a way to get there, allowing him to realize a work's emotional
goals.

On this CD, the big piece (in more than one sense of the phrase) is the
Sextet.  In his liner notes, Rosner remarks that the rich sound of the
Brahms and Dvorak sextets partly inspired the work.  Indeed, in the
balance between "head and heart," Rosner very strongly reminds me of
Brahms, although of course their idioms differ.  Rosner's  Sextet falls
into two substantial movements: "Variations" and "Motet."  Both movements
riff off of the old chorale tune "Nun komm' der Heiden Heiland" -- the
tune, rather than the harmony -- and in that sense, both are variations
of a sort.  In his liner notes, Rosner points out that he avoided Bach's
well-known settings.  A Renaissance arrangement by Praetorius inspired
him, although the harmonies remain Rosner's own.  I've not heard the
Praetorius, but I have heard a setting by Scheidt and believe I know why
Rosner gravitated toward the earlier take on the tune: the ambiguity of
the tonality, as if caught somewhere between the extremes of modality
and harmony.  Rosner himself refers to a blend of "Renaissance" and
"Baroque" in this work.  The first movement is more "harmonic" and
contains many Baroque contrapuntal procedures, culminating in a magnificent
double fugue -- or, more accurately, magnificent music that happens to
be a double fugue.  The second movement evokes Renaissance compositional
procedures.  The music moves differently in the two movements.  Rosner
constructs phrases and cadences differently: the first movement, in ways
familiar to us through music from Bach to Mahler; the second, in less
familiar ways -- the dramatic "evenness" of a phrase by, say, Josquin
or Palestrina.

"Variations" consists of eight variations on the chorale tune.  Indeed,
the chorale tune -- excepting perhaps the first phrase, and that only
at the very beginning and at the very end -- is never quoted straight.
This is very similar to the concept of the opening movement of Vaughan
Williams's eighth symphony -- variations without a theme.  Furthermore,
the variations' borders tend to blend into one another, rather than to
clearly separate one section from the next, like (again) Vaughan Williams's
Five Variants on "Dives and Lazarus."  Consequently, one tends to think
of the entire movement rather than this or that section.  Like most
composers since Beethoven, Rosner plays the double game: constructing
variations interesting in themselves and yet part of a dramatic, rhetorical
whole.  The chorale tune roams into other paths which in turn tend to
recall or lead back to the tune.  It wanders in and out of foreground.
I'm almost positive that, on the page, just about everything in that
movement relates to some part of "Nun komm' der Heiden Heiland," but to
the ear the tune wanders pretty far from home.  The movement features
two dynamic peaks -- the first a "devil's harmonization" of the tune,
the latter the double fugue, also the most rhythmically complex of the
variations.  Several different rhythms and pulses compete for dominance.
Just deciding what should be heard at any given moment must have given
the performers much to think about.  The fugue breaks up into a transitional
meditative passage, and we hear the first phrase of the chorale tune,
ending with Rosner's final commentary on it.

The second movement, "Motet," works more like a Tudor fantasy.  The
chorale tune is less noticeable.  In many cases, it functions as an
architectural principle, often like a cantus firmus, rather than like
a full-fledged theme.  Rosner grows tendrils of music, their roots in
the soil of the tune, but flowering into something different.  Not only
does the tune holds the movement together, but characteristic rhythms do
so as well, especially a quarter followed by two eighths, and a scalar
upward run of four sixteenths.  Gradually, the chorale becomes more
prominent until a climax breaks again into a final meditation.  This
time, however, the chorale tune has the last word, as if to affirm its
eternal presence in the mind.

Again, I find this work in an exalted, limited company of chamber music.
I won't embarrass either Rosner or myself by naming those scores I regard
as its brothers in merit.  I will say, however, that composers like
Schubert and Brahms come to mind.  On the other hand, Rosner succeeds
maybe too well in his goal of richness of sound.  There's nothing wrong
with a sextet, but I keep wondering (greedy for sensation) how much more
impact a full string ensemble would make -- the difference between the
slow movement to Barber's string quartet and the Adagio for Strings.  I
imagine that, as with the Barber, this would create two very different
pieces from the same blueprint.

In my first review of Rosner's music, I worried that he seemed to want
profundity all the time -- that he had no "light" side.  To me, the
really great composers show you a wide range of human experience.  Bach
has Aus der Tiefe and the "Peasant" cantata.  Elgar writes the symphonies
and The Wand of Youth, Beethoven the fifth and the eighth symphonies,
and so on.  I needn't have fretted.  There is indeed a lighter Rosner,
although lightness does not imply lightweight.  Besos sin cuento ("kisses
without number"), a cycle of songs, sets six Spanish Renaissance love
poems.  The sentiments run from earthy to elegiac to teasing to tender.
Rosner apparently wrote them just because he wanted to, without thought
of immediate performance (the story of how the recording came about is
pretty funny; you can read it in Rosner's CD liner notes).  He gave
himself the job of writing something without "overtones" of mortality
or the religious.  He succeeded pretty much, although I would argue that
the fifth song, "Duermes, Licisca" ("sleep, Licisca"), about an aging
woman, once a beautiful hellcat, is an archetypal ubi sunt and thus
speaks to mortality.  Rosner wrote the cycle for voice and the brilliant
and sensual combination of Debussy's sonata for flute, viola, and harp.
He adds a tambourine in the fourth song, "En Jaen" ("in Jaen").  The
harp typically evokes the lute or guitar, while the "melody" instruments
suggest a wordless voice.  However, within this little quartet, Rosner
achieves great color variety.  For example, the third song, "Al Amor"
("to love," from whose verses Rosner gets the cycle's title) is only for
voice and flute.  Also, although Rosner has expressed a brighter point
of view than usual, he has done so without compromise.  The ensemble
must be razor-sharp, often in unusual meters like 5/8 and 11/8, and the
tunes themselves are damned difficult to sing.  The melodies aren't
especially bizarre or hard on the ear -- in fact, they're beautiful --
but they do require a really good singer.  To me, they seem more congenial
to instruments than to the voice, with long, long phrases and odd skips.
They don't forgive a weak pair of lungs or a "sort-of" sense of pitch.
I don't know what a Spanish speaker would make of the settings (like
Rosner, my Spanish confines itself to menus and bits from the movies),
but they certainly get across the poems' emotional points.  The songs
all come over strongly and vividly, with great changes of mood, and I
can't really pick a favorite without mentioning them all.  Wonderful.

Rosner wants to follow in Hindemith's footsteps and write a sonata for
all the standard instruments.  At this point, he's got only two to go:
one for bassoon, one for double bass.  He has created some stunning
examples for cello, horn (both on Albany TROY163), and oboe (Centaur
CRC2451): epic, heroic, poetic.  The trombone sonata, in the words of
the composer, is rather "big-boned," as befits the sound of the instrument.
I must admit, however, that during my first couple of listens to the
work, I thought I detected a whiff of exercise in it, but Rosner won me
over.  The harmonies are based on fourths and fifths, which will remind
some of Hindemith, but I think Rosner simply wants to accommodate the
natural bent of the instrument.  The soloist's balance with the piano
is one of the built-in problems of such a work, and Rosner specifies
that the piano lid be open.  The first movement reminds me of early
Renaissance "Turmmusik," in three-part counterpoint.  It takes really
large strides and big breaths, and you'd think that three-part counterpoint
isn't nearly enough to sustain the thought.  You'd be wrong.  I have no
idea how Rosner brings it off.  The middle movement meditates in a way
that reminds me of Richard Yardumian's or Alan Hovhaness's slow movements
-- that tinge of Middle Eastern melismata alternating with chorale-like
sections.  Rosner throws in the wrinkle of a 7/8 meter, which never calls
attention to itself.  We hear instead a long, singing line.  The third
movement opens as a call to arms, which moves to a lilting triple-time.
The two groups of ideas alternate and interpenetrate in sonata fashion.
The sonata isn't all blare.  Rosner constructs many builds and fadeaways.
Trombonists in search of repertoire would do well to look this one up.

None of these pieces is easy.  None of them gives away all its secrets
immediately.  The sextet in particular requires six heroes willing to
invest a great deal of effort.  The Sestetto Agosto do heroes' work.
This is a terrific performance, although not a definitive one.  You
wouldn't expect it for a piece like this, any more than you'd expect
players of a Beethoven string quartet to nail it on the first try.  The
piece needs more performances, more recordings, from many different
players.  It deserves no less.  In the meantime, the Sestetto Agosto
certainly give you the stature of the piece, in a committed, passionate
reading, and their handling of the incredible textural and architectural
problems earns all my respect.  Pinotage will charm you out of your socks
in the Besos sin cuento, while Julia Bentley clears the many high vocal
hurdles (including the demand for a cruelly wide range) the composer has
set before her.  The sonata performers do well.  Erickson has a fine
tone, both loud and soft, while Angelina Tallaj successfully competes
dynamically.  I miss a certain amount of shaping in the performance,
but, as I've said, these works reveal themselves over time.

This is volume three of Albany's series of Rosner's chamber music.  I
strongly recommend the other two: volume one features the cello and horn
sonatas as well as an incredible tour de force for two pianos, Of Numbers
and Bells (Albany TROY163); volume 2, powerful string quartets (Albany
TROY210).

Steve Schwartz