Edgard Varese
          Complete Works

* Tuning Up
* Ameriques
* Poeme electronique
* Arcana
* Nocturnal*
* Un grand sommeil noir** (orch. Beaumont)
* Un grand sommeil noir^
* Offrandes^^
* Hyperprism
* Octandre
* Integrales
* Ecuatorial~
* Ionisation
* Density 21.5~~ (orch. Beaumont)
* Deserts
* Dance for Burgess

* ^^ Sarah Leonard, soprano
** ^Mirielle Delunsch, soprano
* Men of the Prague Philharmonic Choir
^ Francois Kerduncuff, piano
~ Kevin Deas, bass
~~ Jacques Zoon, flute
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (all orchestral works), ASKO Ensemble (all
chamber works)/Riccardo Chailly
London 289 460 208-2 Total time: 71:72 + 79.14

Summary for the Busy Executive: Oh, brave new world!

Edgar Varese reinvented music.  Or, rather, he expanded the ways
music could be made.  It's hard to do this - much easier to start from
an established point - and consequently, Varese's output was small.  His
reputation rested on perhaps a dozen works, if that, created over roughly
a fifty-year span.  While he lived, not many people knew what he was about,
including some of his own students.  All by himself, he opened up or
changed a significant part of the musical landscape.  Indeed, he expanded
the range of what one could validly call music.  He began so many things
which composers followed up on only decades later that his music still
confounds many.  The Sixties and Seventies should have been his time, but,
for some reason, the new-music audience preferred crude imitations of his
work to the real thing.

I came to Varese's music in the Sixties, a Vanguard recording by Maurice
Abravanel and the Utah Symphony of the early Ameriques.  Vital and
vigorous, it reminded me a lot of the New York City docks of the time.  I
was hooked.  Of course, back then, most of the 18th and 19th centuries'
music (the standard repertoire) bored me.  I wanted something I couldn't
predict, and Varese's work gave me that in spades.  I tried other things,
mostly on the Columbia label, but thought them rather dry and wondered what
had happened to Varese in the meantime.

However, I heard the occasional live performance, exclusively in university
venues, and realized that some performances were better than others.  One
problem of a real original like Varese (or Vaughan Williams or Webern or
Tchaikovsky, among others) is the likelihood that he will be misunderstood,
at least initially and often for a long time.  In Varese's case, the most
astonishing misconceptions have grown up around his music, some of them
even errors of fact.  One of the latter is that Varese invented electronic
music and scores realized on tape.  He didn't, although he produced at
least two brilliant and beautiful examples in Poeme electronique and in
Deserts.

The second misconception concerns Varese's artistic personality.
Most people think of him as a "mathematical," "scientific" (in the
bad senses of those terms) composer.  True enough, he was attracted to
"scientific"-sounding titles like Hyperprism and Density 21.5, but there is
indeed a difference between a title and a work.  The primitive fascinated
Varese - whether the chants of Popol vuh, the vastness of deserts, or the
adventures of atoms and molecules.  This does not make him a mathematician
or scientist in his approach to music.  He is, above all, a Romantic, as
besotted by the romance of science as Shelley, Baudelaire, or Whitman.
Ameriques is not merely "about" the New World, but about new worlds, new
horizons opening up, earthly exploration as the symbol of a spiritual one.

Many listeners may find Varese's music hard to get hold of, since most
of it doesn't work with melodies or even themes, but with planes of sound
or musical activity.  It's a music not of theme, but of gesture, and the
musical shapes stick in the mind.  One may not be able to hum a work by
Varese, but one doesn't forget it either.

Many of these works have been "realized" or edited by the composer's pupil,
Chou Wen-chung.  These are not recompositions or arrangements, but a kind
of "face-cleaning." Quite a few of Varese's scores were commissioned, but
the performances fell through, for one reason or another.  For these
pieces, Varese never got to make the inevitable adjustments arising from
rehearsals.  In others, one finds discrepancies between the composer's
manuscript and the published score.  Chou Wen-chung has resolved these.
The notes tell you the extent of his ministrations.  The only true
arrangement consists of an orchestration by Anthony Beaumont of the early
song "Un grand sommeil noir," and it's a honey.  The original version for
voice and piano is offered as well.  Varese destroyed almost all of his
early work (there was actually a lot of it) after he found his true path.
Indeed, I would recommend beginning with this song.  Varese's Romantic
nature is here easiest to get hold of.  You haven't the distractions of
an unfamiliar idiom.

I consider Ionisation one of the great twentieth-century scores - a kind
of Declaration of Independence for percussion and other noisemakers.  If
you're waiting for Tchaikovskian melody, that bus will never come.  On
its own terms, however, Ionisation exerts a powerful fascination on the
listener.  I especially like the siren, insinuating through the texture
like a sidewinder.  Other highlights include the witty Tuning Up - probably
in at least a small way inspired by the general perception of Varese's
music - and the Poeme electronique, a score for the Brussels World Fair
in 1958.  This is Varese's only score completely for tape.  Like the
"Tuba mirum" in the Berlioz Requiem, the music is spatially conceived.
Originally played through 400 loudspeakers at the Philips pavilion, the
music aims to paint a changing aural landscape and to reorient a listener's
sense of space.  It goes beyond quadraphonic, heading for a sound stage of
360 degrees.  The present mix into stereo still retains a sense of this.

I could talk about each piece, but Varese's music should be experienced
first and then discussed.  Chailly and his forces deliver revelatory
performances.  I've never heard Varese sound so good.  Chailly's secret
seems to be that he treats it all as music, rather than as a Ph.D. thesis.
I recommend these performances over Boulez on Sony and Nagano on Erato.
There's nothing really wrong with the Nagano (although I prefer Chailly),
but you get fewer works.  The London sound is wonderful.

Steve Schwartz