Benjamin Lees
* Symphony No. 4 "Memorial Candles" (1985)
Kimball Wheeler (mezzo), James Buswell (violin)
National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine/Theodore Kuchar
Total time: 61:42
Naxos 8.559002
Any work of art on the Holocaust - in fact, any serious meditation on the
Holocaust - is fraught with dangers. The acts committed terrify so and the
suffering endured lie so beyond comprehension that the frame art provides,
through both flat recital and bathetic excess, can easily diminish what
went on. Furthermore, we tend to condemn morally those works which fall
short. Yet art also forces us not just to remember, but to remember with
feeling. The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre provided its own horrors, but
because there's no great artistic monument, we don't care. Nevertheless,
forgetting human cruelty opens us up to more of it, just as the knives in
the kitchen drawer make catastrophe possible.
Several composers have written works listeners have associated with the
Holocaust, among them Pergament, Schifrin, Gorecki, Britten, Vainberg,
Tippett, and Shostakovich. Most compositions on the subject fall from
their own overweight or lack of strength. Some fail to leave much of an
impression at all. Yet, it's a subject that makes the composer who chooses
it want to give the best he has. Most composers don't set out to produce
crap. I find it extraordinarily interesting that a composer who identified
himself very strongly with his Jewish roots, Ernest Bloch, wrote nothing
about the Holocaust and, in fact, actually stopped composing during the
war, due to extreme depression over the events. If the subject stifles
an artist with the range of Bloch, it should at least give others pause.
Benjamin Lees has built a solid, even distinguished reputation as a
composer, although in common with most composers working in a postwar
neoclassic idiom, his work hasn't yet garnered much academic attention in
print. Most of the writing on Lees's output has taken the form of reviews
of recordings, one indication of the importance of the genre to composers
of Lees's generation and general style. It's one thing to trash a work
by Stravinsky in Gramophone, since Stravinsky has the attention of other
writers, but quite another to dump on a composer like William Bergsma.
Both American Record Guide and Fanfare reviewed this work. The American
Record Guide's Allen Gimbel came up with a tiresome crank - more a record
of dyspepsia than a serious attempt to engage the work. Among other
things, he complains about (I swear) the liner notes and counts how many
times Lees's setting repeats a word. He also describes Nobel Laureate
Nelly Sachs's poems, which serve as Lees's texts, as "dated" - how, he
never says. I don't doubt the sincerity of Gimbel's response, but I can
dismiss this kind of rant fairly easily, particularly when it fails to
focus on the piece supposedly under discussion and to make a case.
On the other hand, Fanfare's review comes from Walter Simmons, a writer
and producer whom I've long admired as one of the heroes in the effort
to promote American music. A typically thoughtful piece, it adopts a tone
"more in sorrow than in anger," and judges the symphony wanting on several
musical counts. Since I find the symphony very powerful indeed, I think
Simmons's review deserves a considered reply.
Simmons makes the following points:
1.The symphony takes too much from Shostakovich, even to the point of
quoting actual themes.
2.Three slow movements tax the listener.
3.The work tends to sprawl.
The first point - the most considerable of the three - is much subtler than
it first appears. Simmons is not saying that everybody has to come up with
a new musical language. After all, by that criterion, Bach wouldn't escape
hanging. He writes:
Mediocre critics and pretentious amateurs are often quick to point
a derisive finger at "derivative" moments, shouting "gotcha," as if
there were some disgrace in a musical passage's resembling a passage
by another composer. On the other hand, there is a problem when the
essence of a composer's expressive content is subsumed within the
work of a prior composer (as in the case of Bernard Heiden and
Hindemith ...), or when one consistently turns to another as a model
for developing musical ideas (as Leonard Bernstein often did with
Copland).
Simmons takes the trouble to point out that neither usually applies to
Lees, but in this work, the Shostakovich similarities make Simmons wish for
the real thing. I like it that Simmons focuses on a particular work - the
solid basis of an aesthetic judgement - and in some detail. In fact, I
hear almost everything he points out - including a tiny appearance of the
DSCH sequence in the second movement - but I have a different take. I
believe that both Shostakovich and Lees (in this work) both hit a kind of
melos found in Eastern European cantorial chant. Shostakovich probably
comes at it from some remove and mostly unconsciously - through Judaic and
generally Semitic influence on Russian folk song. Lees, on the other hand,
most likely has chosen deliberately, but not from Shostakovich. First,
nothing is really made of DSCH in the Lees work. It's more a momentary
efflorescence and transformation of previous material - like seeing shapes
in clouds. If one hears Shostakovich, fine - it's a feature, not a bug, as
far as I'm concerned, like a bit of newsprint in a Cubist collage. Second,
the personalities of the two composers and the ways their music moves
differ greatly. Vainberg, for example, is practically Shostakovich's
musical Doppelganger - I doubt most listeners not thoroughly acquainted
with Shostakovich's catalogue could guess the real composer of a Vainberg
piece. I consider Vainberg's work magnificent. The fact that it sounds
like Shostakovich is by me a plus, and yet it violates both of Simmons's
axioms. I'd love to have twenty-plus more Shostakovich symphonies, even
if they were written by someone else. Yet Lees comes nowhere close to
Vainberg's level of resemblance on either count. Finally, the symphonic
meta-narratives Lees and Shostakovich construct have little to do with one
another. Simmons draws attention to the slow movement of Shostakovich's
Fifth as an unhealthy, overbearing influence on Lees's second movement. I
don't see his point at all. To me, Shostakovich basically works the Mahler
adagio - classical song (in this case, lament) with motific variation,
while Lees comes up with something sui generis, dramatic rather than (as
with Shostakovich) lyric, a perpetual variation of a small number of tiny,
basic patterns - a worrying of close intervals - with what sounds to me
like the traditional Rosh Hashonah shofar calls occasionally breaking
through. In short, whatever resemblance bothers Simmons has flown by me.
But my kind of "rebuttal" is ultimately superfluous. The real issue, of
course, is not close imitation or even the expressive absorption of one
composer's music in that of another, but, crudely put, whether the work
convinces you all by itself. Obviously, it hasn't convinced Simmons, even
if he hadn't given those particular reasons, but it does connect with me
and, when I checked customer comments at amazon.com, with at least two
other listeners. This is why horses race.
Enough already. I want to talk about why the piece has such power for me.
First, I admire the risks Lees has taken. The immensity of the subject,
as I've said, can overwhelm a Holocaust work. Lees, in common with
most successful Holocaust writers, including Nelly Sachs (Lees's poet),
explicitly deals with a piece of it, like grabbing hold of one thread
dangling from a coat. Consequently, Sachs's poems deal with events
allusively and elliptically. The music of her language, rather than her
images, connects us to the power of such events. The images give a "local
habitation" to that power. Like Blake, Sachs can "see a world in a grain
of sand." Lees's instrumental argument serves the same function in the
symphony, while the vocals locate the emotional neighborhood. Moreover,
Lees - as Vaughan Williams did in his "Pastoral" Symphony - comes up with
a symphony of movements, "all slow." Although plenty happens in the
symphony, the slow pace challenges the listener to keep up, without the
candy of a quick dance.
Second, Lees has fashioned - from traditional elements, certainly - his own
music of mourning. For example, Gorecki's Symphony No. 3 deals knowingly
in the standard musical rituals of lament: an orchestra dominated by the
lower instruments, minor tonality, and so on. It's all very distant and
abstract. That it has affected so many listeners testifies to the power
of those conventions. On the other hand, Lees has given us something
intensely personal - a tonal idiom, harmonically and emotionally fluid,
spanning rage to tenderness - which essentially creates its own set of
conventions, as Shostakovich does in his "Babi Yar" Symphony.
Third, Lees has created an ingenious musical imagery, which springs from
Sachs's texts. For me, the poem most central to the symphony appears
first, "Someone blew the shofar." It describes the shofar - the ram's horn,
a call to arms and a call to prayer - sounding out, even while the temple
goes up in flames. The image speaks of both suffering and endurance. Of
course, we hear fanfares from the orchestra - and not just from the brass,
either - but more important, I believe, is Lees's extended use of solo
violin - in his words, "the 'soul' instrument of Central and Eastern
Europe." The violin comes to symbolize the persistence of Jewish culture,
as the orchestra rages around it. Lees also uses a mezzo to deliver the
poems, and the mezzo seems to me the cry of the individual - representative
of the whole, but still individual. The imagery, of course, extends to
specific musical figures, but these I think communicate directly with the
listener and need no discussion from me.
The first movement - "Visitations," subtitled "Someone blew the shofar,"
purely instrumental - lasts as long as some symphonies, and, indeed, I can
make out "movement" subdivisions, as opposed to classical sonata-allegro
development, within. Whether Lees intended this, I don't know. The work
begins with a profound tolling, beautifully, clearly orchestrated, and
winding, nervous cries from the winds. The brass worry half-steps in
chords, and the strings begin a spare, two-line dialogue, which turns out
to bear most of the argument. All these elements continually recombine,
until (about two-and-a-half minutes in), we reach our first climax on
the brass idea. Lees works with this basic set of ideas throughout the
movement, in a kind of perpetual variation of pitch, timbre, and rhythm.
You never meet an idea in quite the same form twice. As I said, it's not
really song, but a continual development and transformation of a small set
of ideas. Through its course, we get a variety of moods, all somber, a few
grotesque. It's the desolation that comes from looking over a battlefield
from which the bodies have not yet been cleared. Yet, in the midst of it
all, the woodwind cries and the persistent sounding of the brass imply the
shofar. Whatever consolation the movement offers comes here. Toward the
end, the violin solo takes up quasi-martial figures, but its softer color
lends a different meaning than that given by the brass. It becomes a kind
of meditation on the shofar. The opening material returns in the mode of
a protest, which peters out, and the movement ends on the material of the
string dialogue, this time spread among all the sections.
The movement "Manifestations" follows, beginning with a cello solo that
seems to catch the martial-meditative mood of the first movement's violin
solo. For me, this is one of the most beautiful passages in the entire
work - noble, restrained. The orchestra breaks in immediately with
tromping chords on and off the beat, fanfares sound, and the music rushes
us to the first vocal solo, "Someone blew the shofar." None of Sachs's
poems strike me as particularly easy to set - not merely from a structural
point of view, but from an emotional one, free of cliche - and Lees comes
up with something exciting and emotionally complex to boot. This music
protests and defies. The instrumental argument continues the poetic
imagery of peril and defiance, with again what sound to me like take-offs
on the traditional shofar calls, insistent in both brass and winds.
Gradually, the material transforms to that Lees will use for the second
poem, "Footsteps." The main musical images is that of a falling minor
third, which eventually shows up to set the word "footsteps." What strikes
me as brilliant, rather than blatant, about it is that it hearkens back to
the first two notes of the entire symphony - the tolling of deep bells -
and probably indicates a complex inter-movement motific development, to be
confirmed by a study of the score. The victim's death is prophesied only
by the sound of footsteps, perhaps down the hall, coming nearer. The
setting does repeat certain words - "footsteps" itself, "hunted," "blood"
- and I commend the mezzo, Kimball Wheeler, for a convincing delivery that
cuts through the orchestra and yet manages to shade meaning.
The third movement - "Transcendence" - begins with the most song-like
passage in the entire symphony - a lullaby accompanied by an imaginative
consort of sweet bells, which conjures up Eastern European Jewish folk
music without explicit quotation. We also hear a "corkscrew" idea in
mainly the strings, heard also in the second movement and that essentially
a transformation of the main string idea of the first movement. This
leads to a "marche grotesque," underneath the "footsteps" rhythm. For the
movement to live up to its title, it must overcome the considerable acid in
this opening. The solo violin appears with a bitter take on klezmer music.
This time, the mezzo interrupts, in duet with the violin. The lullaby
accompaniment returns and melts into solemn declamation, as the mezzo sings
of remembrance. But we're pretty near the conclusion. When will we
transcend? Indeed, the work does not end easily. The orchestra begins to
churn again in a danse macabre Indeed, a simplistic resort to either glory
or serenity would insult the victims. There's no vision of heaven. The
messy feelings of outrage, sorrow, and peril mix with the solo violin's
meditation, which comes down to a single note, supported by a held chord
from the orchestra - the endurance of hope, the survival of the victims.
The symphony will not allow us neither to forget nor to bury the dead in
sentimentality. To me, it's the only ending possible - the slim hope that
we will continue to remember and to care enough to act when it happens
again.
The performers do an amazing job of advocacy with the first recording
of an extremely complex score. Buswell is electric in his solos.
Kimball Wheeler, as I've said, sings with great sensitivity. If I have
any complaint at all, it's that I don't think her voice is quite big enough
for the role. Kuchar not only has an orchestra playing on its mettle, he
also has a firm grasp of structure. This, I repeat, is a work of subtle
interrelationships. I would not have known that if Kuchar hadn't point it
out. The composer (at the amazon.com web site) has expressed his very
great pleasure in this performance, and no wonder. Nevertheless, for this
symphony to really shine, it needs a lot of conductors making a run at it.
We won't have the full measure of the work, until we get at least five
first-rate recordings.
The sound is fine, a little bright, but all to serve clarity of texture.
My heartfelt appreciation to Naxos on its American series.
Steve Schwartz
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