Robert Beaser, "The Seven Deadly Sins," "Chorale Variations" and Piano Concerto. Performed by the American Composers Orchestra, conductor Dennis Russell Davies, baritone Jan Opalach (in "Seven Deadly Sins") and pianist Pamela Mia Paul (in the concerto). Argo 440 337-2
Benjamin Britten, Piano Concerto, "Soirees Musicales" and "Matinees Musicales." Performed by Helsingborn Symphony Orchestra, conductor Okko Kamu and pianist Ralf Gothoni (in the concerto). Ondine ODE 825-2
These CDs introduce some major works by one of America's most important younger composers and re-introduce some minor pieces by one of the century's greatest masters. Beaser, whose new song cycle, "The Heavenly Feast," will be premiered by the Baltimore Symphony and soprano Dawn Upshaw this week, is a composer who recalls Britten in his sensitivity to great poetry and his ability to match its challenge musically.
Beaser's "The Seven Deadly Sins" is a setting of poems from Anthony Hecht's 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winning volume "The Hard Hours," and Beaser does almost as well by Hecht's rhetorically ++ muscular and flexible verse as Britten did by Mallarme in "Les Illuminations" and by Blake in "Songs of Innocence and Experience." In setting Hecht's poems, the composer conjures up many styles, jazz and French impressionism among them. But there is always the sense of a distinctive musical voice that melds with the poet's virtuosic and ironic language. There is an assertive, heroic quality in "Pride"; a delicious ease, with hints of Satie and Debussy, in "Sloth"; a driving, jazzy energy in "Wrath"; and a cool, insinuating quality in "Lust." It's a fine match between a composer who clearly loves working with words and a poet who's infatuated with music. The performances by Opalach, Davies and the orchestra are superb.
The composer's "Chorale Variations," a purely orchestral work, is also interesting: 10 discrete and tightly organized sections that -- contrary to the expectations one has of variation form -- sound spontaneous. From the opening, with its majestic trumpet fanfare, to its rapt ending, "Chorale Variations" displays unflagging energy, wit and expressiveness. Davies' composer-supervised performance is splendid.
Beaser's Piano Concerto simply isn't in this class. The work is too long, at 37 minutes, for its materials, but its failure has less to do with its composer than with the dead end in which the piano concerto genre currently finds itself. First perfected by Mozart in the 1780s, the piano concerto had a glorious run of 150 years that ended with the concertos of Rachmaninoff, Bartok, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. It is essentially an epic and Romantic form, in which a heroic protagonist (the pianist) is pitted against the masses (the orchestra), that does not play well in our anti-Romantic and anti-heroic second half-century. Beaser attempts to use the concerto genre to make fun of it. This is something that Saint-Saens, Moritz Moszkowski, Arthur de Greef and Poulenc once did superbly, but one of the reasons for their success was that they were working in a still viable form in which they themselves still believed.
The piano concerto, as the Ondine disc demonstrates, was a form in which even a genius-composer such as Britten, who had a complete mastery of the instrument, couldn't entirely succeed. The Britten concerto, written in the composer's youth in the 1930s and revised in 1945, is a much better piece than Beaser's. It has a comic grotesquerie that has something of the wit of the Shostakovich and Prokofiev concertos and a melodic thrust that sometimes suggests those of Rachmaninoff.
But the mixture of those elements also suggests that the young Britten didn't know exactly what kind of piece he wanted to write.
The performance by Gothoni, the winner of the 1994 Gilmore Artist Award, contains as a bonus the original third movement the composer discarded in his 1945 revision. His reading, while good enough, does not begin to approach the dazzling results the composer himself achieved: a 1968 recording that features Britten conducting the English Chamber Orchestra for the great Sviatoslav Richter and that should be reissued on London-Decca records. Kamu and the Norwegian orchestra do nicely by the "Soirees" and the "Matinees," charming trifles that Britten based on melodies by Rossini.
HEAR THE MUSIC
To hear excerpts from the American Composers Orchestrrecording of Robert Beaser, call Sundial, The Sun's telephone information service, at (410) 783-1800. In Anne Arundel County, call (410) 268-7736; in Harford County, (410) 836-5028; in Carroll County, (410) 848-0338. Using a touch-tone phone, punch in the four-digit code 6190 after you hear the greeting.