ウェブプレーヤーを開く
Now here’s a strange thing. After 25 years of avidly listening to orchestral music, I have finally worked out who my favourite composer is. And I only found out he existed a few weeks ago. It is through this discovery that a hitherto undiscovered soundworld of delights has been opened.
Henry Cowell has been labelled many things – ultra modernist, accessible experimentalist, intuitive postmodernist, to name a few. The all-too convenient badge of ‘maverick’ is the one which is often most applied. This, however, can often be a euphemism for an artist misunderstood and sidelined by the establishment and therefore deemed not worthy of any further serious discussion.
This CD of chamber and vocal music is as accessible an introduction to his work as there probably is at present. This is a twentieth century composer who eschewed turgid academic atonality qua atonality, as well as derivative gestures to the romantic canon. Instead, the music is robustly self-contained within a structure defined by its own inventive idiomatic devices. Whilst it appears born of a natural stream-of-consciousness creative energy, there is a rigour to the musical ideas that convey the sense of a composer who could master most genres.
Cowell clearly shares Stravinsky’s unique talent for crossing musical boundaries and styles. He is at ease spanning baroque, serialism and lyrical tonalism; but in a musical language that is marked by a generous sense of colour and textural richness. The economy of scale is also an impressive hallmark in his compositions – so many musical ideas are conceived within compact time-scales and this only serves to give them added brevity.
The works on this CD will at once captivate with their eclectic fusion of polyrhythmic harmonisation and nuanced contrapuntal phrasings. There is a playful spontaneity in the opening piano pieces where heavy chord pulses (presumably via the performer’s palms or arms!) intersperse otherwise linear melodic passages. The enchanting quartet for oboe, cello and harpsichord conveys a rich palette of accessible baroque-style counterpoint working within a largely lush soundscape of tightly patterned melody. The same applies to the suite for violin and piano. In the Irish Suite, we see the composer’s flair for integrating multiple genres. The first two movement’s dissonant and ethereal use of string piano is resolved with a more dream-like ending – although even here we witness strains towards an unsullied modernism that prevents an easy resolution to an intricate work.
Unfortunately, there are very few recorded symphonies on the market, although he wrote over a dozen. One can only long for the day when these multi-layered masterworks are newly recorded and released. Most however can now be found on Youtube and the fourth, fifth and seventh are well worth exploring. The fifth in particular is a thing of majestic beauty. Like Ives and Roy Harris, Cowell’s large-scale outputs have a strong folkloric undercurrent, evoking broad planes and a spiritual connection with nature. This often involves blending richly-coloured elegiac motifs with visceral driving rhythmic structures, not to mention passages of mischievous experimental bombast. Yet it someone has its own distinctive symphonic language that separates it from other great American modernists writing at that time.
But that indeed is what makes Cowell the composer he is and gives him his gravitas: he composed what he wanted, in a form that fitted the mood and moment, and in a way which allowed him to be liberated from the constricting prescriptions of any over-arching dogma or tradition.
他の国からのトップレビュー
mbt_123
There's only one Mr Cowell
2015年11月15日に英国でレビュー済みAmazonで購入
Stephen Webster
Five Stars
2015年11月9日に英国でレビュー済みAmazonで購入
