Yehudi Wyner

*  The Mirror (1972-73)
*  Passover Offering (1959)
*  Tants un Maysele (1981)

Richard Stoltzman, clarinet; Carol Wincenc, flute; Daniel Stepner, violin;
Ronald Thomas, cello; James Guttman, double bass; Bruce Creditor, clarinet;
Jennifer Langham, cello; David Taylor, bass trombone; Robert Schulz,
percussion; Carol Meyer, soprano; Judi Brown Kirchner, mezzo-soprano;
Matthew Kirchner, tenor; Richard Lalli, baritone; Yehudi Wyner, piano.
Naxos 8.559423 Total time: 58:07

Summary for the Busy Executive: Songs my father taught me.

Yehudi Wyner comes from a musical family.  His dad, Lazar Weiner (who
changed his children's names, but not his own), was a choral conductor
and a composer himself and is regarded by many as the father of Yiddish
art song.  Wyner studied with a host of lights at Yale and Harvard,
including Hindemith, Richard Donovan, Randall Thompson, and Walter Piston.
An enthusiastic advocate of new music, even other than his own, he has
served as a composing power of sorts and teacher in the Boston area for
years.  Yet, I doubt many classical-music listeners have heard his name
before.

Some of Wyner's music I can leave alone.  Some I like quite a bit.
In both cases, the works show what one writer has dubbed "a surplus
of musicality." That is, even though I may not like a certain piece, I
have to admit it's not routine or shoddy, and there's almost always some
imaginative stroke that surprises me.  Furthermore, Wyner exhibits great
range of expression and idiom.  Some of his pieces graciously let a
listener in; others brandish spines.  He can go from the folk-like to
an idiom very much like Berg's (a composer I don't care for, excepting
Lulu).  The works here lie closer to "easy" rather than to "hard." All
that said, Wyner's range to some extent works against him.  He does so
many styles well that one can't get a fix on his artistic personality.
I suspect not many can recognize a Wyner composition they haven't heard
before.

The big work for me here is Wyner's incidental music to The Mirror,
Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer's first play.  It's the usual Singer
mix of sexual repression and fantasy, demons, and the suffocating life
of the shtetl.  Wyner comes up with an ensemble suggestive of klezmer
(clarinet, violin, bass, percussion, and singers), with satiric strains
reminiscent of Robert Kurka's Schweik music thrown in.  Wyner's compositional
imagination works on high here.  For one thing, as befits the economics
of the theater, the score requires only four instrumentalists.  Yet Wyner
never resorts to a real "fill-in" instrument, like a keyboard, although
violin and bass might double-stop. Nevertheless, the music often sounds
satisfyingly full, a tribute to his craft as well as to his poetry.
Wyner makes a big deal of the collected music not being a "real" suite,
but that just shows an excess of conscience, as far as I'm concerned.
Every number gets its grip on you.  I especially liked the "Flight"
music, largely a duet between melody instruments.  Yet you never think
the composer has short-changed you.  I also like the wedding song --
beautiful and tender.  Wyner, married to a virtuoso singer, certainly
knows how to write for voice.  The song is a honey.

Ann Arbor has been a town mad for new music, with a very eclectic range.
The composers Ross Lee Finney, William Bolcom, and William Albright
taught at the university.  Contemporary concerts draw unusually large
audiences.  I heard my first Steve Reich pieces there in a graduate
English class, of all places, and participated in a performance of Cage's
piece for 13 radios -- what a blast!  In the late Fifties, WUOM, the
enterprising university radio station, commissioned several composers
for works related to national or religious holidays.  Wyner chose to
write Passover Offering, the Jewish holiday of liberation.  Again, Wyner
comes up with an unusual ensemble -- flute, clarinet, trombone, and bass
-- and makes it work.  The idiom, as you may guess, suggests Jewish
cantorial singing and shofar music (the ceremonial ram's horn symbolized
by the trombone).  Parts of it reminded me of Bernstein's Dybbuk, although
Wyner wrote over a decade earlier.  The work falls into four movements:
Lento (Oppression, Enslavement), Energico (Uprising, Plague, Exodus by
Sea), Alla Marcia (A Desert March), Grave (Despair, Hope), and Quieto
(Silent Prayer, The Promised Land).  The subtitles may initially help
some get a fix on the emotional temperature of the music, but they're
not strictly necessary.  This is a work of large Romantic sensibility,
with a "narrative" very easily followed.  Wyner has called it "a mixture
of a type of Stravinsky's neoclassicism with the approach of Alban Berg,"
and one can see his point.  That is, the textures and structures are
song-like or dance-like, while the sensibility is both a bit off-balance
and on edge.  The Mirror expresses itself more directly, but Passover
Offering plumbs more deeply.

Tants un Maysele ("dance and little story"), in two movements, does
exactly what it says.  The first movement dances in a Rite-of-Springy
way.  The second movement sings.  Wyner made up the tunes, but based
them on melodies he's known all his life.  Despite the title of the
second movement, there's no obvious program.  I really like the dance,
not least because I like rhythmic music.  The maysele for me goes on a
little too long, though it has some very beautiful, rather melancholy
moments.

Congratulations to Naxos and their Milken Archive series, devoted to
music by American Jewish composers.  They cover a wide range of idioms
in mainly very good performances, not excepting these.  Wyner's music
isn't easy, but the players and singers not only get the notes, they
make music.  The recorded sound is quite fine.

Steve Schwartz