Richard Danielpour’s work, while assuredly well-intentioned, suffers from a common problem in the contemporary “classical” world–a sometimes desperate need to appear approachable in a way that may work against the actual music. The most obvious result of this tendency is the adoption of cute, provocative, or self-consciously mysterious movement titles, raising the obvious question of whether or not what we hear lives up to them. As often as not, it doesn’t (“There’s a Ghost in My Room!” from Book II is a steely toccata à la Prokofiev that sounds like a stray number out of Visions fugitives). Debussy, in his similarly pictorial set of piano preludes, famously put their titles after the music itself, asking the player to consider them first as pure music, and only then as expressive of something more concrete.
Danielpour’s preludes not only have individual titles, but the titles have titles (“The Enchanted Garden” overall, for some reason). Book I supposedly was inspired by the composer’s dreams, Book II by his life experiences, begging the further question of whether he dreams about anything especially musical, or whether his life is particularly interesting. “Mardi Gras”, for example, allegedly encapsulates a dream about the Berlin Philharmonic dancing down the streets of New Orleans. Is this what modern composers dream about? With all due respect to Mr. Danielpour, I have my doubts. It’s too easy, even banal. The prelude, in any case, is a jazz pastiche that has its fun moments without being especially original or memorable.
Indeed, a good deal of this music is derivative. “From the Underground” bears a curious resemblance in its keyboard figurations to the finale of Ravel’s Concerto in G major; the turbulent central episode in “Night” sounds like it comes straight out of the first movement of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion; “Lean Kat Stride” is another jazz pastiche, a tribute to the composer’s wife which is unquestionably sincerely meant–but is it good music?
“Surrounded by Idiots” supposedly touches on the difficulties of life in New York, but like Wagner’s treatment of Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, there’s a fine line between parody and hostility, and for all his efforts to “reach out” to his listeners, Danielpour does it from above, not without a touch of condescension. This is evident in the last piece of each book, “Night” and “Winter Solstice” respectively, where he seems concerned always to remind us that beneath the clowning and the color, this music really is about something deep, and that something (as he makes even clearer in “A Community of Silence”) is the artist Richard Danielpour.
As should be obvious by now, this music strikes me as contrived. It is, however, very well played by Xiayin Wang, for whom Book II was written, and also sonorously engineered by Naxos. Part of the problem for Danielpour is that of expectations: it is more difficult for a modern composer to establish an artistic identity in a world chock full of certified masterpieces all of which are ready to hand at literally the touch of a button, particularly when he works from within established tradition. One can’t fault Danielpour (who certainly understands the problem–perhaps too well!) for trying, and others may find his particular solution more captivating than I did. Certainly there’s no risk in listening and judging for yourself.
