Arnold Rosner
      Orchestral Music, Volume 1

* A Millennium Overture, op. 112
* A Sephardic Rhapsody, op. 95
* Concerto for 2 Trumpets, Strings, and Timpani, op. 107* ^
* The Tragedy of Queen Jane, op. 78^

Altoona Symphony Orchestra/Nicholas Palmer
*Robert Murray, Jonathan Martin (trumpets), Glenn Northern (timpani)
^Owensboro Symphony Orchestra/Nicholas Palmer
Albany TROY548 Total time: 74:55

Summary for the Busy Executive: Raptured out.

I've often expressed my bewilderment at the fact that major orchestras
haven't rushed to record Arnold Rosner's music.  To me, he's one of the
best now writing.  Almost everything I've heard rings for me with the
sound of a classic. I might as well admit I've found exactly two pieces
in all the Rosner I've listened to I haven't cared for, but Beethoven
wrote at least two pieces I don't care for.  On the other hand, I see
little sense obsessing over the work I don't like at the expense of that
work I love.

You can hear many influences in Rosner: Bloch, Hovhaness, perhaps even
Vaughan Williams.  All this really means is that these composers use a
modally-tinged idiom, if not actual modes.  Rosner is sometimes free,
sometimes strict with his modal writing.  However, the artistic personality
he reminds me most of is, believe it or not, Brahms.  Both composers
have tremendous musical intellect and also take pains to hide the "head
work" in service of emotional expression.  Rosner can play rhythmic and
contrapuntal games worthy of Elliott Carter, but he keeps that aspect
of his composing so far in the background that you may not even be aware
of the game being played.  All this is to say that while Rosner knows
how to build a piece, he doesn't necessarily rub your nose in the
blueprints.

I first heard Rosner's music by accident.  I had bought a CD for one
particular work and a piece by Rosner happened to come along for the
ride - his Responses, Hosanna, and Fugue, op. 67 (Harmonia Mundi France,
HMU 906012, NLA; reissued on Kleos 5119), a masterpiece for multiple
string choirs.  Since then, it's been mainly chamber works.  I don't
complain, exactly.  I'm quite grateful for any Rosner that comes my way.
But this says a lot about the contemporary music scene in the United
States.  Mostly chamber music gets recorded, because orchestral music
costs more to record.  Consequently, I'm doubly grateful for a CD of
Rosner's orchestral music, and the designation "Volume 1" makes my heart
go pit-a-pat.

All four works in this volume have strong individual identities.  They
indicate without fully revealing Rosner's expressive range.  A Millennium
Overture is kind of an odd duck, due mainly to the circumstances of its
composition.  The conductor David Amos, a champion of Rosner (he conducted
the Harmonia Mundi disc), had asked for a work, and Rosner wanted to
oblige.  However, the pressure of other commitments prevented the composer
from writing a brand-new piece, and so he orchestrated the finale to his
second cello sonata, which I haven't heard (the first, a flat-out
masterpiece).  This one little bit of extraneous information kind of got
in my way.  I wanted to know how the piece came off in its original
context.  On its own, it's quite fine, but it seems to me the end of a
journey, rather than the entire journey.  I can't say whether I would
have felt the same way if I hadn't known. The music is muscular, rather
than light, and witty in its own way, rather than in, say, Mozart's or
Beethoven's way.  The emphasis on fourths and fifths puts me in mind of
Hindemith or Holmboe, while the counterpoint serves mainly to ratchet
up the rhythmic intensity, a strong Hindemith trait. But it doesn't
really sound like Hindemith, or indeed like anyone else.  Rosner, like
Prokofiev or Vaughan Williams, has his own voice - no small feat.

You may find A Sephardic Rhapsody somewhat misnamed, if you've expected
something absolutely freewheeling or merely sequential.  Rosner instead
explores the melodic, contrapuntal, and harmonic implications of at least
one unusual (to me, anyway) mode.  As a listener, I experience great
satisfaction in this piece - that the composer has said everything
essential.  In his liner notes to the CD, Rosner explains very well
what he's up to technically.  But, again, "technically" isn't the point.
What one feels is a gorgeous, long-breathing melody that lifts you up.
The melody twists and turns and varies, with plenty of interplay among
soloists (especially a soaring trumpet), but it seems all of a piece
nevertheless.  About half-way through, the music changes to a vigorous
fugato.  Rosner points out the binary structure of most rhapsodies - at
least the ones by Liszt, Enescu, and Bartok - song followed by dance.
Rosner keeps to this general plan, although the fugato serves as an
introduction to the dance proper, an ecstatic toe-tapper in seven quick
pulses.  There's a strong Middle Eastern "tinge," to borrow a term from
Jelly Roll Morton, throughout the piece, and the work ends with a terrific
build-up for a standing ovation.

Rosner extracted the suite The Tragedy of Queen Jane from his opera The
Chronicle of Nine (based on Lady Jane Grey's nine-day reign), written
about twenty years ago and unperformed to this day.  Given the current
dismal level of opera in the United States, the act of composing one
seems Quixotic, to say the least, especially without a prestigious
foundation behind you.  But Rosner has written at least one other opera,
a shortie on the Yiddish shaggy-dog story "Bonstche Schweig," which has
been performed in an unstaged piano-vocal reduction (even the number of
singers was reduced).  Perhaps someone will stage both Bontsche and
Chronicle.  Maybe next year in Jerusalem, as the saying goes.  The Queen
Jane suite invokes Renaissance music and genres in Rosner's own way.
Although undoubtedly dramatic music, however, it doesn't seem music
for drama.  The analogy again is Brahms.  One can't deny the conflict
in Brahms's music, but it doesn't seem the music of a stage dramatist:
one interested in character and cross-purposes and even irony.  Rosner's
(and Brahms's) music seems to me primarily lyrical in impulse.  Yet a
hearing of The Chronicle might dispel that impression as the excerpts
take on a different function in the context of the opera itself.  As it
stands, the suite, very beautiful on its own, suggests a composer whose
vision is too big for the stage and for characters.  Of four strong
movements, my favorite is "Masque," an exquisite little suite-within-suite
of Renaissance-like dances.  In its scope, you'd have to go to something
like the "Courtly Dances" from Britten's Gloriana.

The concerto for 2 trumpets and timpani impresses me the most of the
works on the program.  It's the most tightly-written and complex, and
it shows Rosner stretching his expressive range without abandoning his
original voice.  It evokes the rhythmic vigor of Baroque music, particularly
in the first movement, where the solo trumpets bounce off one another.
Harmonically, it's more chromatic and less modal than usual in Rosner.
But the composer not only retains his usual power, he increases it.  I
must say that Rosner surprises even me with the slow movement, one of
the finest among those works I've heard.  It's the usual gambit of the
long arch, but Rosner, unlike many, can sustain the span he has designed.
It may dawn on you (if you don't cheat and read the liner notes first)
that it's also a passacaglia, a series of variations over a ground bass.
Such is Rosner's skill in constructing the bass line and in "overlapping"
the variations, however, that you will more likely experience it as a
song of growing intensity.  Although the song sounds complex (both in
its notes and in the emotions it stirs), as an act of singing it sounds
absolutely "natural." The finale burns down the barn with sennets and
tuckets from the trumpets, echoed rhythmically by the timpani.  I think
the concerto a major work, not only for Rosner, but for anybody.

The performances are all at least acceptable and, in every case but
the concerto, even quite fine.  I prefer, for example, Palmer's reading
of the "Dirge" movement (prelude to Act II) of the Queen Jane suite to
David Amos's on Laurel LR-849CD, and Amos is no slouch.  Palmer shapes
the movement more lucidly, however.  He conveys a clearer sense of the
whole.  Believe it or not, the Owensboro Symphony outplays the Jerusalem
Symphony (surprised the earwax out of me), and the sound is better,
besides.  The Altoona players are just as good, but I have no direct
piece-by-piece comparison in their case.  However, the concerto demands
more of Owensboro.  The trumpet soloists are wonderful and the strings
good enough (although here and there one wishes for a richer sound). The
timpanist, however, sounds tentative throughout, as if afraid to overwhelm
the trumpeters.  It might be a mere matter of microphone placement or
the ambience of the hall.  At any rate, he sounds as if someone buried
him in the front-hall closet, behind the heavy winter coats.  For a first
recording, however, this is a more-than-credible account.  It's certainly
good enough to convey the stature of the concerto, a piece that demands
several readings before it comes into full focus.

Steve Schwartz