Throughout his composing career Peter Eötvös has found a broad range of vocal music and music theater genres conducive to experimentation, as the five varied works on this disc readily bear out. Interestingly, the most recent piece turns out to be the most conservative and conventional of the group: a pair of Chekov monologues scored for baritone voice and orchestra. Its slow motion arc, crabbed dissonances, and subtle instrumentation would not be out of place in a Karl Amadeus Hartmann adagio or a Roger Sessions symphony. Not surprisingly the vocal line is lyrical and dark, laced with startling and effective leaps into falsetto terrain. Harakari is a scene for reciter and two shakuhachi players composed in response to Yukio Mishima’s suicide. Rhythmic intercutting by a woodchopper heightens and shapes the piece’s emotional build, although I sense that the visual impact of a theatrical presentation might enhance the drama in ways an 18-minute audio recording can’t begin to suggest.
Insetti Galanti is one of three works Eötvös calls “madrigal comedies”. Eschewing fixed pitches, the composer fuses the resonance of certain consonants with deft rhythmic polyphony that transforms human voices into a veritable percussion ensemble. The radio play Tale manipulates pre-recorded speech patterns at slightly different speeds, creating a kind of off-balance verbal counterpoint. The disc closes with another tape piece, this time organized from cricket sounds processed through a ring modulator. Eötvös models his structure on the patterns that ensue from a pendulum with five balls, but you don’t have to know that in order to appreciate the beauty and logic with which the insect songs flow. The recordings span more than three decades, so expect pronounced but not distracting sonic variance between works and venues.
