Aside from his career as a conductor, José Serebrier has enjoyed some success as a composer, though not as much as he probably deserves. There’s an excellent disc of his orchestral music on Reference Recordings, and (among other things) he has done a good bit of work as an arranger of a very effective suite from Janácek’s The Makropoulos Case (also on Reference Recordings) and a soon-to-be-issued symphony based on tunes from Bizet’s Carmen. In short, he is not a conductor who also composes, but a composer who also conducts.
All of Serebrier’s music displays a sense of drama and flair for the unexpected. Symphony No. 3, for strings and soprano vocalise (here presented with stylish spookiness by Serbrier’s wife Carole Farley), begins with a frantic movement that sounds a bit like the second movement of Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet. At the movement’s center the work’s “motto” theme appears, and it is this tune that will be developed as the work proceeds. The second movement is an elegiac chant largely for cellos, with some Bartókian nocturnal atmospherics toward the end. The next part is a wistful rhapsody with waltz interludes, while the marvelous “film noir” finale introduces the solo soprano to haunting effect. It’s a fine work, and under the composer’s direction we can assume that it’s played as well as it can be by the forces to whom it is dedicated.
The other major works sustain the overall impression of high quality composition, particularly the evocative Fantasia for strings (one of Serebrier’s best known pieces, to the extent that any of them are). Perhaps most impressive is the Passacaglia and Perpetuum Mobile for accordion and chamber orchestra, a piece that risks sounding simply stupid but that here emerges as completely successful, the solo part effortlessly and naturally integrated into the instrumental tapestry. The other works range from the darkly expressionistic Momento psicológico to the comparatively jocose Variations on a Theme from Childhood–and all of them reveal Serebrier’s innate feeling for instrumental color and shapeliness of form. Excellent sonics round out this very enjoyable and rewarding musical portrait.
