Peter Lieberson

* Drala
* Fire
* Concerto for Four Groups of Instruments*
* Accordance*
* Ziji*
* Raising the Gaze*
* Three Songs*^
* Free and Easy Wanderer~

Rosemary Hardy (soprano)^; The Cleveland Orchestra; *ASKO Ensemble; London
Sinfonietta~/Oliver Knussen.
DG 457 696-2  TT: 67:35

Summary for the Busy Executive: Dancing Buddha.

Peter Lieberson, son of (I believe) composer and Columbia Records executive
Goddard Lieberson, studied with, among others, Milton Babbitt.  For a
man with the reputation of strait-jacketing cultural commissar, Milton
Babbitt has turned out a variety of students, most of whom don't sound
like him, let alone like each other.  Perhaps the reputation isn't all
that well-deserved.  Peter Lieberson found his first success fairly
early, with a well-received piano concerto for Peter Serkin.  Andrew
Porter raved about it as a major addition to the repertory.  Lieberson
has flown pretty much under the radar, at least in the United States,
ever since.  These works represent high points from the past twenty-five
or so years and give me a chance to catch up, so to speak.

Buddhism provides major inspiration for Lieberson, but you don't have
to follow or even know much about Buddhism to enjoy the music -- colorful,
viscerally exciting, and mystically intense.  Lieberson keeps using
natural imagery to describe his music, but the thing it most reminds me
of is a very complicated watch.  A lot of things happen at any one time,
and these incidents relate to each other.  Lieberson's music gives me
the pleasure of looking at the innards of a beautiful repeater.  Lieberson's
work reminds me a lot of Knussen's -- that is, I think I understand some
of the music's appeal to Knussen -- but strikes me as less closely-worked
and more powerful.  One sees these things very clearly in Drala, four
movements played without pause.  In the third movement, "Offerings and
Praises," one hears an extended cello solo, accompanied by a second
cello, flute, and vibraphone.  In his comments, the composer points out
this combo as something he's proud of.  It came to him literally in a
dream -- a lucky accident.  Yet it comes across as a bit muddy.  One can
easily imagine Knussen coming up with a combination as unusual but much
clearer.  On the other hand, I know of nothing in Knussen as primal as
Drala's final movement, "Raising Windhorse," which raises images of
weather systems, complex currents in various quarters of the sky.

Lieberson writes of the attraction of the single-movement form or of several
tightly-related movements.  He goes so far as to say

   The concept of a multi-movement work in which
   the movements may not even be musically related
   has always felt foreign to me.

The question is, of course, why separate movements *should* be related.
Such a notion would have surprised Bach and Mozart in anything other than
variations.  It comes mainly through the Second Viennese School's veneration
of certain aspects of Beethoven.  It's also a definition of "relationship"
naively narrowed to "paper relationship" -- eye, rather than ear.  Movements
can relate to one another in all sorts of ways, not just in exhibiting
variant patterns of notes.  The larger question is always, "Does the music
cohere?"  A work can fall apart, or fail to come together, despite the
procedure of generation from Ur-motif.  If not, artistic success comes down
to the merely mechanical procedure, something I'm sure Lieberson doesn't
believe.

Drala is a Buddhist concept of spiritual energy.  Again, you don't need
to know this to discover the energy of the piece.  It's readily apparent.

The Concerto for Four Groups of Instruments, the earliest piece on
the disc, shows the influence of late Stravinsky, particularly, I think,
the Movements for piano and orchestra.  It's bright and energetic,
appropriate to a young man starting out.  In a sense, it's very much of
its time -- the Seventies -- so far as its compositional procedures go
(the post-Webernian serialism that most people think of when they sneer
the word "intellectual").  Each group of instruments (and the instrumental
combos are both intriguing and sonically winning) has its own thematic
material.  Lieberson sets himself the task of relating the material of
each group to the others.  If you have any interest in how composers
think, this info may help you, but again it's not the reason why the
piece is so winning, any more than Bach's fugues are attractive simply
because they're fugues.  It has something for the listener who could
care less about the machinery.  In contrast to so many of the pieces of
the Sixties and Seventies in that idiom, it displays an original voice
of great wit and charm, as lively as a lamb in Spring.

Accordance doesn't come off nearly so well for me.  Lieberson writes
that he had become tired of the idiom of the Concerto and was looking
for a richer, more "Romantic" sound.  He certainly found it.  Accordance
glows like burnished bronze.  Lieberson also regards the piece as the
"opposite" of the Concerto: where the Concerto concerned itself with
"melodies" combining into harmonies, Accordance generates melodies from
a basic set of "chords." The method is readily apparent to the ear,
particularly toward the end, but the interest of the piece comes mostly
from observing the working-out.  There's little really beyond that, at
least for me.

I also have blown hot and cold over the Three Songs.  Unlike many of his
dodecaphonic colleagues, Lieberson actually knows how to write for the
voice.  For him, it's not simply another instrument that happens to
handle words.  The lines make vocal sense.  Lieberson's music follows
the sentiment and the "narrative" of the poems (by Douglas Penick) very
perceptively.  Yet doubt nags me.  I keep asking myself what distinguishes
this setting from countless other settings in the same idiom.  What makes
these songs individually memorable, as Faure's Notre Amour, Schubert's
Ganymed, or Vaughan Williams's Silent Noon?  I can't answer the question,
and it may well be the wrong question.

Ziji means "rejoicing," but don't expect Handel.  To me, it sounds a
little angry, defiant in the way of Poulenc's Elegie for horn and piano.
Undoubtedly, much of this association stems from Ziji's instrumentation
-- horn, clarinet, string trio, and piano -- since horn and piano figure
prominently in the opening.  Again, one hears some late Stravinsky here
and there, but the piece impresses one more forcefully as an emotional
statement.  To me, this is one of the great chamber pieces since 1950.
Here, Lieberson achieves the warm Romanticism he sought in Accordance.

Raising the Gaze (the title relates to Buddhist meditation) begins as a
kind of contemporary exercise in chinoiserie -- Ravel's "Laideronnette"
updated.  Lieberson seems to deliberately evoke Asian music -- heretofore,
his appropriations have been far more abstract.  "Raising Windhorse,"
for example, used the rhythm of a Tibetan war cry, but I know this only
because Lieberson's liner notes told me so.  Raising the Gaze, like Ziji,
throws off plenty of rhythmic sparks.  It gets the blood moving.

Lieberson conceives Fire as part of a series on the Tibetan five elements.
He has written none of the other parts yet.  Based on this piece, I don't
think he should bother.  Compared to Ziji or Raising the Gaze, Fire fails
to light, despite a lot of orchestral activity (including a wind machine).
One comes across Lieberson's musical fingerprints, but I can't shake the
feeling that quite a few composers could have written this piece.  I'd
say the same of the beginning of the Grainger-like titled Free and Easy
Wanderer, but interest picks up about a minute into the piece.  Considering
Lieberson's Buddhism, the nervous energy of so much of Lieberson's music
surprises me.  He seems to really need meditation.  Even the less-hyper
end (Lieberson jokingly refers to it as a "chorale") seems uneasy,
although that may stem from the dodecaphonic idiom itself.

Performances are fantastic.  The Cleveland Orchestra needs no puff from
me, and its years under Dohnanyi have turned it into perhaps the best
large orchestra for contemporary music.  One hears just about everything
in Drala and Fire.  The ASKO Ensemble and the London Sinfonietta play
with point and verve.  Rosemary Hardy triumphs over the mechanics of the
Three Songs and beautifully communicates.  When one considers the "game
tries" of so many performances of contemporary music, one may forgive
oneself for regarding these as little miracles.  The sound is superb.
A splendid job all around.

Steve Schwartz