Robert Mueller (born 1958) is a frequently awarded and commissioned composer who teaches at the University of Arkansas, and conducts the university’s symphony orchestra. He is not to be confused with the former FBI director Robert Mueller, although the latter’s qualities of honesty, integrity, and forthrightness certainly inform the earnest workmanship and accessibility of the “other” Robert Mueller’s chamber music.
Emblems explores expanding and contracting short phrases between oboe and three string instruments, where the music always seems to stop in its tracks and start over. It’s somewhat academic compared to the assertive profile of La Pointe au Portail for oboe, cello, and piano, where steady rhythms from the piano anchor yet never inhibit free-flowing melodic lines from the other players. Sparseness and lyricism characterize the attractive triptych Deserted Paths for flute, oboe, and piano.
By contrast, the violin, saxophone, and piano trio entitled Fields on the Edge of Forever truly gets going at the halfway point with carefully built-up motoric interplay. The title selection is scored for oboe, English horn, and two bassoons; here I enjoy the witty Stravinsky-like detaché material more than the slower, more harmonically amorphous writing.
At first I thought the four-movement String Quartet was a newly discovered late Shostakovich piece. It is, in a way, because Mueller wrote it in homage to the Russian composer, and the music is more than a mere cheap imitation. Perhaps the piano trio Echo Fantasy’s extended sequences involving sustained phrases in extreme registers go on too long for what they have to say. But the spacious simplicity of Mantra for oboe and piano unfolds in astutely judged proportions.
Three of the works feature Mueller at the piano, and one assumes that all of the performances were prepared under his supervision. I hesitate to single out any particular musician for praise, for each displays great skill, flexibility, and obvious commitment to doing well by the composer, who also provides articulate and informative annotations for this excellently engineered release.
