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Works of Brilliance and Inventive Orchestral Colors
Es-Pekka
Salonen has quietly become one of the more important composers of our
time and this generous CD presents three of his most powerful works
that demonstrate this fact. Many may have felt that Salonen's stature
as a conductor would lure him away from the composing arena, but this
young genius quietly goes about his multifaceted busy career as a
gifted conductor (he has honed the Los Angeles Philharmonic into one of
the world's great orchestras), as an inventive conceptual programmer,
as a festival participant in the best of the world's festival of music,
and as a warmly confident communicator of the necessity of classical
music in our lives. While he first gained notice for his emphasis on
the meticulous readings of 20th Century composers (Lutoslawski,
Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, Messiaen, etc), his audiences now find
him exploring the Old Masters with as much attention to detail and
finding the inner core of the composers' wishes. His time as a
conductor is now.
And perhaps it is that constant commitment to
revealing performances of great music that has nurtured his own
creative process. This CD clearly finds Salonen with a recognizable
musical language, with indelible marks that are found in all of his compositions, with a clear and inimitable voice.
Salonen
goes for clarity of line: his themes are born, grow, mutate, and
miscengenate, all in the rich palette of the very large orchestra. His
use of the percussion section echoes a bit of Stravinsky, a bit of
Adams, a bit of the Slavic school. His use of the woodwinds and brass
are as exotically creative as those of Shostakovich and Lutoslawski,
and his massive spectrum of writing for strings has the urgency of the
great Romantic composers like Wagner's 'Tristan', Sibelius, Ravel, etc.
'Foreign Bodies’ (2001) thrusts open with a range of color that
seems almost climatic - until the work fuses into an elegiac second
movement, and subsequently ends in a mysterious dance that flutters and
flies as lightly as the opening movement is grounded in declaration.
'Insomnia'
(2002) is a richly evocative work about the colors of night - not the
serene view of other composers but the place of nightmares and fears
and disturbances that make space without light, a table for restless
tossing and turning. The use of the chorale mode opens the work,
eventually giving over to Salonen's 'machine' effect of churning
instruments against each other. The work moves to an adagio in the low
registers of horns and tubas signaling the arrival of sleep only to be
blissfully interrupted with the rise of the colorful sun announcing day
with ascending brass themes, artfully unresolved as befitting the
unknown that accompanies dawn.
'Wing on Wing' is perhaps the
most majestic and richly creative work by Salonen to date. Composed as
an homage to the new, extraordinarily brilliant Walt Disney Hall in Los
Angeles, the brainchild creation of architect Frank Gehry and
acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, this work combines the broadest spectrum
of orchestral color with the human voice, both sung and spoken. The
work is about water and wind, echoing the curvilinear structure of the
hall's concept. The term 'wing on wing' is taken from the nautical term
of opening the foresail and mainsail to maximum amount of surface to
capture all of the wind available. Salonen blends the string choirs
with the brass choirs and punctuates the movement with every percussive instrument imaginable
to unfurl this ship on high seas. To this he adds the wordless
vocalises of two sopranos (with impossibly high tessituras) and the
recorded spoken words by Gehry about the artistic process. In the end
the words 'as in a dream' float throughout the hall over the luxurious
palette of the orchestra.
The performances here are well done
with Salonen conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and
soloists. And as fine as this recording is, there is nothing to compare
the live performance of 'Wing on Wing' in the hall for which it was
written, a hall that has encouraged Salonen to place his forces
throughout the building to reveal how even the smallest sound in the
farthest corner can be heard with utmost clarity. But this comes as
close as can be expected.
Grady Harp, February 2005 |
