Benjamin Lees
        Complete Works for Violin
* Sonata No. 3
* Sonata No. 2
* Invenzione for solo violin
* Sonata No. 1

Ellen Orner (violin), Joel Wizansky (piano)
Total time: 71:04
Albany TROY 138

Summary for the Busy Executive: Not for the complacent or faint of heart.

Contrary, I suspect, to popular belief, we do not suffer from a dearth
of wonderful contemporary composers, but a surfeit.  Without breaking a
sweat, I could name three really good ones within an hour's drive from me.
I could name at least five I've encountered on Internet music-discussion
lists.  It's as if we can hold in our heads at most six at a time and so
neglect fine, strongly communicative work.  That we have so many composers
in the face of such dismal economic conditions (making a living solely from
writing classical music is less likely than winning the Publisher's
Clearinghouse sweepstakes) never fails to amaze me.

Everything I've heard by American Benjamin Lees has impressed me mightily.
I regard him as one of our very best - up there with Copland, Harris,
Thomson, Piston, Barber, Carter, Gershwin, Bernstein, Schuman, and Diamond,
our current list of enduring American classics.  Yet one encounters his
music only rarely, usually on labels like CRI, Louisville, New World, and
now Albany.  I remember two major-label LP releases - on CBS, with Graffman
marching through one of the piano sonatas and on RCA, with Buketoff
conducting a terrific concerto for string quartet and orchestra, even
better than Martinu's.

Since so few have likely encountered the name, I'll furnish a few details
about his career.  Lees, born in 1924 (which makes him roughly contemporary
with Bernstein), studied in California with, among others, George Antheil.
Antheil had been a member of our avant-garde during the Twenties with such
works as the Jazz Symphony and Ballet mecanique, but soon abandoned a
remarkable vein of composition for Stravinskian neo-classicism.  I find
Antheil in his Stravinsky suit less remarkable, but I must admit he knew
his stuff.  Lees shares with Antheil a formidable grasp of craft.  Unlike
many American composers of his generation, Lees made little or no use of
the American vernacular, although you can identify an energy in his rhythms
which many associate with American music.  Still, like Sessions, Piston,
and Mennin, one notes a desire to produce "classic" work, which means a
strong alignment with a European view of things.  Normally, I wave the
flag more than most and distrust such a view, not because I fear Wholesale
Old-World Corruption, but because American composers cutting themselves
off from the multifarious vitality of American vernacular music usually
results in anemic work.  You'd better have something mighty good of your
own.  Fortunately, Lees - like Piston and Sessions - does.  By conventional
measures, he's had a good career, with performances from major conductors,
orchestras, and players - including Szell, Ormandy, Leinsdorf, Steinberg,
Schippers, Maazel, and Mehta.  Lees spent the better part of the Fifties
in Europe but remained untouched by the hot tickets of Boulez (a year
younger), Messiaen, Nono, Leibowitz, Stockhausen, Henze, Lutoslawski, and
Ligeti.  In my experience, audiences strongly like his work.  Yet, no star
performer or recording company can be accused of championing him, in the
way British Decca did for Britten, CBS did for Copland, and Nonesuch seems
to do for Adams.

Three traits in Lees's music impress me most:  a tremendous momentum,
born of crackling rhythm and logic, surprise at what happens (although the
surprise always results from the implications of his basic material), and
the handsomeness of his musical forms.  Lees isn't afraid of dissonance,
but it's dissonance within a strongly tonal context, like Bartok and
Prokofiev.  The sense of key sticks to the listener particularly strongly.
Ellen Orner's liner notes to the CD talk of the influence on Lees of
Surrealism, and it may very well be true.  To me, such elements, if they
exist, don't matter as much as those other three things.  Indeed, I find
the coherence of Lees's musical thought (rather than the psychological
synthesis arising from wildly opposite thoughts - the main Surrealist
strategy) unmistakably strong.  Yet it's not "cerebral," in the pejorative
sense many listeners use the term, any more than Brahms.  The music tells
emotionally, but, like Brahms, Lees is serious and tough-minded about his
work.

This CD gathers Lees's chamber music for violin, and I prefer to discuss
it in order of composition, even though the works appear on the CD most
recent first.  The Violin Sonata No.  1's opening may remind some of
Prokofiev or even Khachaturian in its rhythmic drive.  The elegance of
the writing and the ease with which Lees switches from his lyrical subjects
to his rhythmic ones definitely move this closer to Prokofiev than
Khachaturian.  Yet it's no knock-off.  For one thing, the rhythms create
more cross-accent than one usually finds in the Russians - jazz echoing
through the subconscious? - but it's not superficially jazzy.  The work
comes from 1953 and thus allies Lees with pre-war rather than postwar
composers - a classic Modernist viewpoint.  More Prokofiev reminiscences
come in the slow movement, particularly in the dialogue between the bass
register of the piano and the high harmonics of the violin, often with
nothing between.  The movement above all impresses with its unapologetic
singing beauty, although it does sing a Prokofiev song.  Well, everybody
starts somewhere, and you could do a lot worse than here.  The last
movement, Allegro con spirito, shows us the future composer peeking out,
with mercurial changes of mood and a set of emotional chameleon-like
changes on a small set of themes.  The music bifurcates.  On the one hand,
one gets the springing rhythmic gestures of the "joyful" finale, yet most
of the movement sounds as serious as a holdup.

The Invenzione for solo violin comes from the early Sixties, when
doctrinaire serialists had triumphed in the universities, and concert
programs had begun to ignore (even more than previously) a large body of
great work.  Lees has the previous models of Bach, Paganini, Ysaye, Bartok,
and perhaps even Bloch - all conceived for virtuosi - and consequently the
work bristles with technical thorns (Lees wrote it for Ricci).  However,
unlike Paganini, for example, the work also demands the intellectual
attention of performer and listener.  It rhapsodically varies a small set
of basic motives and welds each variation into a "symphonic" structure,
much as Brahms does in his Haydn-Variationen.  Pay great attention to the
declamatory introduction, since probably all the material comes from there
(I've no score and haven't checked).  Furthermore, the variations aren't
always clearly demarcated, but tend to flow into each other, so that we
get more the macroscopic view than the microscopic one.  The work has
great sweep from start to finish:  declamatory intro, allegro, lyrical
"breather," scherzo passage, recap of most of the material from the intro
on, a hell-for-leather drive to the finish, interrupted by another breather
and recap of the opening declamation.  Obviously, a lot of structural
associations can be made - to sonata-allegro, symphony, sonata-rondo, and
so on - all from the basic variation format.  Its emphasis on tonal centers
must have struck critical minds at the time as hopelessly out of date, but
the music is too vital and too communicative to dismiss or forget, even
with all the intellect that went into its construction.  By this time,
Prokofiev is nowhere in sight; Lees has become his own man.  I can't really
call his style immediately identifiable, in the sense that Stravinsky's is,
even though I get no "echoes," but his virtues go from work to work.

The second sonata (1973) begins, unusually enough, with a solo cadenza
on the movement's themes.  The piano crashes in, and the movement takes
off.  In her liner notes, Orner points out that although the music changes
meter practically bar-by-bar, the effect is one of energy, rather than
instability.  To the listener, the technique of the meter change isn't the
point, and it's as if Lees has an inner gyroscope that allows him to lean
way out over the rhythmic edge without tipping over.  Lees worries his
themes into new shapes, and the movement proceeds with a relentless drive,
even at the "lyrical" second subject group.  I note only two points of
comparative relaxation - the movement is a grim one - a little less than
four minutes from the end, and a bit over two minutes before the end,
when the music seems to peter out, despite some attempts to rouse itself,
into final stasis.  That's where the second movement - the official slow
movement - begins.  Unlike its corresponding in the first sonata, this
is no song.  In conventional terms, the music goes nowhere, as the piano
obsesses over single notes and half-tone intervals.  Yet it gives off
incredible tension.  There's a phantasmagoric, brooding quality and
an austerity that calls to mind the bleak emotional terrain of late
Shostakovich.  The second movement seems to lead directly into the third,
where all that pent-up energy finally explodes in a biting, angry, and
quick rondo, full of violin "special effects." The effects always make an
emotional point, reinforcing the menace, and the two instruments generate
great power.  This music grabs and shakes you.  I think it one of the
century's best.

With the Sonata No.  3 of 1989, the desire to relate movements ever more
tightly, which we noted in the second, results in a one-movement work.
To some extent, this is a giant rhapsody, rather than sonata movements
stuffed into one.  Yet, unlike most rhapsodies, the music holds tightly
together.  It seems to generate itself, like cellular division.  Pay very
close attention to the opening.  Here, Lees starts varying his basic ideas
from the get-go.  It's a movement of continuous variation, such as we
encounter in something like the Pettersson second violin concerto, but
without the motific abundance of Pettersson.  Orner notes three basic
ideas in the sonata, and each is distinct and memorable.  If you don't
know what they are at the beginning, Lees has drilled them and their
variants into you so thoroughly, you'll know them by the end.  Lees wrings
an unbelievable amount of mileage from these - well, "cells" really.
Furthermore, we rediscover Lees's dramatic ability within abstract forms,
the capacity to build a compelling rhetorical propulsion in his music, all
without conventional melody or any of the cliche riffs of Modernism.  I
suspect that one reason why Lees is so hard to pin down stylistically is
that not only doesn't he steal from others, he also doesn't steal from
himself.

Orner and Wizansky give passionate, committed performances, in the
beautifully balanced, fully equal partnership implied by the music itself.
It couldn't have been easy, but they give back the music as if they had
first absorbed it into their bones.  There are finer technicians around
than either one, but no better musicians.  First-class.  Sound is
acceptable.

Steve Schwartz