Gerard Schurmann

* Concerto for Orchestra
* Violin Concerto

Oliver Charlier (violin); BBC Philharmonic/Gerard Schurmann.
Chandos CHAN 9915 {DDD}  TT: 65:03

Summary for the Busy Executive: Weak tea with cream in a Sevres cup.

Gerard Schurmann has a fine reputation, thoroughly deserved, as a conductor
specializing in Modern and Contemporary music.  However, he also studied
composition with Alan Rawsthorne, yet another great British composer known
by all too few.  I must admit that I brought several prejudices to this CD,
one of which is that I'm not fond of the compositions of the current crop
of professional conductors.  Bernstein, Knussen, and Surinach were the last
conductors whose original music I thought worth my time.  Maazel, Sinopoli,
and Segerstam connect with me not at all.  The music never comes together
with convincing rhetoric and sounds, at any rate (as opposed to any pattern
coherencies in the score discoverable by eye), like so much marking time or
stuff rehashed.

I admit I have misgivings lumping Schurmann in with the others.  A
little voice inside my head keeps noodging me that I've mistaken the
music.  Ordinarily, I'm quite willing to live with people thinking me
a second-rate, insensitive jerk, but this is different.  The music is
just interesting enough to lift it out of the "Conductors' Music" category,
which means that if I listened to it more, it might get even better.
After all, it took me decades to regard Brahms as anything other than
an overstuffed Victorian horsehair sofa or Ralph Richardson's pedantic
Finsbury brother in the movie The Wrong Box.  I could, of course, parrot my
betters, but what's the point? In the end, it's more helpful simply to say
what I think now and why I think it.

Of the two "concerti" on the program, I prefer the one for orchestra
over the one for violin.  Of course, the title Concerto for Orchestra
immediately brings to mind Bartok's example, and Schurmann admits that
he plays off the earlier piece.  Schurmann's has five movements, all
marvelously scored.  Many of the sounds come from the Bartok, but Schurmann
creates his own very effective and even beautiful sounds himself.  Just
by listening, one becomes aware of a very tight motific development
throughout.  If I didn't find the ideas particularly memorable, that may
well have more to do with my memory rather than with Schurmann's invention.
Against the implication of my faint praise, I did encounter wonderful
moments.

The first movement alternates a driving allegro with dream-like passages.
The allegro sections seem to me like an accompaniment to a movie -- just
at the far side of consciousness -- but, of course and unfortunately, there
is no movie.  More compelling are the dream-like sections, which hint at
gamelan music (Schurmann was born in the Dutch East Indies).  Yet even here
I think more of Britten's Prince of the Pagodas than of something original
to Schurmann.  The second movement, a night piece titled "Moonbird," begins
with the usual atmospheric stuff, but before you're quite sure how you got
there, you find yourself in the middle of a quirky grotesquerie, again with
more than a hint of Britten, and then (in Schurmann's own words) a passage
"majestic" and "ecstatic." This is for me the most successful movement in
the concerto.  The third movement, an angry scherzo, mutters and threatens
and finally explodes.  It takes its share of risks, particularly in long
near-static passages for low brass and bass drum.  However, more than once,
Britten and Bartok yet again peek through.  I'm really not sure why they
have to, other than Schurmann couldn't think of anything of his own as
convincing.  The fourth-movement allegretto began as a musical birthday
card for wind quintet to Loren Maazel (Maazel's Pittsburgh Symphony
commissioned the concerto).  Rather bald references to the "Giuoco delle
coppie" movement of Bartok's concerto appear, again for no good rhetorical
reason.  The model for the finale seems Bartok's finale -- propulsion by a
moto perpetuo engine of strings.  Schurmann attempts, among other things,
to sum up the work thus far.  Transformations of ideas previously heard are
riffed on, but since most of the ideas simply weren't that memorable in the
first place, a great deal of the movement's point dwindles.  I grant its
rhythmic excitement and the exciting sounds emanating from the orchestra,
but John Williams's score for E.  T.  has as much and operates at a higher
level of thematic invention.

Most important, in my opinion, the concerto lacks rhetorical cohesion among
movements.  It doesn't quite come off as a unified piece, as opposed to a
collection of separate movements.  It doesn't really progress, as does the
Bartok, from one movement to the next.  Given the thematic cohesion, I'm
not really sure why this should be so.  A matter of key progression? The
lack of "fit" between previous end and new beginning?

The violin concerto, on the other hand, natters.  It natters in a gorgeous
suit, but it natters nevertheless.  The motific cohesion is, if anything,
higher than in the Concerto for Orchestra.  But it that's all it took
to write a masterpiece, then we would rate Raff over Liszt.  Some do, I
admit.  Nevertheless, Schurmann does take chances.  For one thing, the
violin almost never shuts up.  This is almost as stressful a part as the
Pettersson second.  In the Pettersson, however, the relentlessness of the
violin screws up the tension.  In the Schurmann, the violinist merely goes
on and on and on.  Again, very little of it sticks.  Very little of it
compels you to listen.  Schurmann also plays his little quotation games,
this time in the second (and last) movement, a set of variations.  We hear
the opening bass figure to Britten's violin concerto.  I have no idea why,
and it's the most intriguing idea in Schurmann's entire concerto.  At more
than a half hour, this piece becomes a mere duty, rather than a pleasure.

The performances, as far as I can tell, are splendid.  Schurmann has given
himself every break.  Charlier gets through his part with grace and even
panache.  Chandos furnishes wonderful sound, with a very "natural" balance
between soloist and orchestra.

Steve Schwartz