Subtitled “The Vision of Francis Goelet”, this excellent collection serves as a tribute to one of the great arts patrons of the 20th century. Goelet commissioned hundreds of new works, an act rendered all the more selfless when you consider, pragmatically, that most of the resultant music will be terrible, or at best forgettable. The four pieces presented here, though, are well-chosen and contain only one outright dud: George Perle’s Transcendental Modulations. The title may be cute, but the piece consists of 25 minutes of anonymous squeak-bloop devoid of character, originality, or a sustained musical thought of more than a few seconds’ duration. Bernard Rands’ …where the murmurs die…, aside from the pretentious title that has nothing discernible to do with the music (and the use of ellipsis, which ought to be a capital crime), is a darkly atmospheric study on a tune that sounds a lot like the opening of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony.
With the Copland and Sessions pieces we come to two of music’s heavy hitters. The real issue with any work that denies itself the expressive and formal advantages inherent in the use of tonality is simple: does the composer’s style have enough character to compensate for what is lost by emphasizing other musical elements. The answer in both of these cases is clearly “yes”. Copland’s scoring and use of timbre is so distinctive, in fact, that you can identify one of his works simply by the way he spaces out a chord in the orchestra. Inscape is easy to follow, colorful, and like Session’s Eighth Symphony (which features a recurring, evocative idea for high violins and maracas), directly expressive and memorable despite the continuously high level of dissonance. Besides, any good recording of a major work by Sessions is something of an event: he’s a connoisseur’s composer, no doubt about it, but a master nonetheless.
Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra turn in very confident, committed performances of all four works. I frankly can’t say definitively if the spasmodic impression made by Perle’s piece is a result of too slow a basic tempo or a quality inherent in the music itself, but I suspect the latter, particularly as all three of the other pieces make a very strong impression and also are extremely naturally recorded. Purely in terms of artistic success, this is necessarily something of mixed bag, but as a tribute to Goelet, and as a survey of music by four important contemporary composers (whether I happen to like them equally isn’t really relevant), this disc is a triumph of which Goelet would have been proud.
