Irwin Bazelon

* Symphony No. One
* Early American Suite
* Suite from Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor

Orchestra of Sofia/Harold Farberman, cond.
Albany TROY508  {DDD} TT: 61:56

Summary for the Busy Executive: Dese, dems, and doze dodecaphonies.

Irwin Bazelon survives more as a character than as a composer.  One hears
the stories about Bazelon rather than the scores he wrote.  Imagine Damon
Runyon recreating Arnold Schoenberg as a Broadway tout.  That dichotomy
attaches to the music itself.  Bazelon made a living as a composer of
commercial scores as well as of High Art.  He can charm and demand.

Symphony No. One (Bazelon's own title) definitely belongs to the demand
side of things.  Honest, I tried hard to dislike it.  The musically faint
of art might consider giving it a miss.  It has two modes of expression:
very intense and very intenser.  It almost never relaxes.  It will not
stay in the background.  In his liner notes, Farberman cites jazz elements
in the score, but they are so sublimated and so abstract I doubt most
listeners would pick up on such things unassisted.  Certainly I needed
Farberman.  Otherwise, it's like most American composers: they write a
certain way because they've grown up around and absorbed certain sounds
and rhythms.  Aaron Copland, outside of his specific "jazz" period,
nevertheless generates rhythms and sounds that probably wouldn't have
occurred to him if he hadn't come into contact with jazz.  Bazelon, to
me, is the same way.  The symphony leads a listener along a very taut
argumentative thread.  Farberman provides a general overview of the
symphony with CD timings for the pieces, but you might not need it.
Bazelon makes himself quite clear.  Rhetorically, the music is a bit
bipolar - what I've sometimes called "brood and explode." The brooding
parts - usually a single "melody" line punctuated by irregular stabs
from other instruments - hang around like surly wasps about their nest.
During the explosions, the wasps ratchet up to "angry" and attack.  My
one reservation about the work is that Bazelon never seems to relax, and
this one-movement symphony lasts close to half an hour.  It's an awfully
long time to have to grit your teeth.  On the other hand, if you can
stand it, this is one exciting piece and -- even though full of massed
brass and percussion -- so well scored that its ideas retain their very
hard edge.

Originally written for a documentary on colonial times, the Early American
Suite for wind quintet and harpsichord, on the other hand, burbles with
neoclassic charm.  But, even here, one can identify certain Bazelon
stylistic fingerprints, notably solo melody punctuated by little rhythmic
nudges from other players.  One also finds a quirky humor.  The "Overture,"
for example, ends with the harpsichord ticking away on one note, like a
clock's innards that refuse to run down, long after the dial is smashed.
"Fun and Games" tosses mainly a single musical line around like a ball.
One instrument sends it off, another picks it up and relays it to the
next.  It reminds me a little of Prokofiev's pawky humor without resorting
to Prokofiev's idiom.  My favorite movement, "Winter," opens with a
wonderfully meditative horn solo and leads to wind duets of various
combinations.  At the end, the solo horn returns.  It evokes the starkness
of winter by quite economical means.

Bazelon composed music for a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor
at John Houseman's American Shakespeare Festival in Stanford, Connecticut,
and culled this suite.  I would love to have seen the production, for
the suite sounds very much tied to the stage action.  Again, one encounters
the predilection for solo lines, here usually turned to comic, even zany
purposes.  But, as befits a romantic comedy, the score has romance as
well as humor, and romance (surprising, considering Bazelon's prickly
symphony) of a very tender sort.  The humor, however, predominates the
suite.  "Ballet for a Postman" for me is a classic of light music - a
bouncy little march.  "Transformation Music" opens with a horn solo
(Herne the Hunter?) which leads to arabesques in the high winds, imitating
the pipes of faery.  Foiling expectations, "Dance of the Fairies" comes
off like a discarded sketch for Le Sacre du printemps, rather than
anything fey or pixie-ish.  These sprites mean business.

Farberman, who's never shied away from the hard, does superbly in the
light stuff and well enough in the symphony.  The Sofia plays a bit raw
and not as precisely as some, but the works are there in essential
outline.  The sound, though several steps below spectacular, is nevertheless
good enough.

Steve Schwartz