Search - Alan Hovhaness, Samuel Baron :: Hovhaness, "Ani" Symphony

The Celestial Vision of Alan Hovhaness

Thomas F. Bertonneau | Oswego, NY United States | 06/04/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Three years after his death, Alan Hovhaness (1911 - 2000) continues to provoke listeners. The debate over his stature - was he a serious composer or merely a purveyor of candied exotica, an Eric Ketelby "plus one," so to speak? - remains unresolved. Thus in "The Companion to Twentieth Century Music," Norman Lebrecht dismisses Hovhaness as having produced "a wearisome profusion" of music "lacking food for thought or emotion"; the editor of "American Record Guide," on the other hand, praises Hovhaness in his journal as "great." The contrast in evaluation could not be more stark. Let me define myself in this quarrel of the critics: I am for Alan Hovhaness, who was a true original, a staunch advocate of unadulterated beauty in music, and a religious thinker who gave form to the ancient and mystical notion that harmony is close to divinity. I love Hovhaness' music. As to the Hovhaness discography: it displays a certain heterogeneity. No major label ever "took him up." A few mainline recordings appeared, such as Fritz Reiner's performance of "Mysterious Mountain," with the Chicago Symphony, for RCA, and Andre Kostelanetz's traversal of "And God Created Great Whales," on Columbia. Otherwise, collectors looked to niche-sources like the Louisville Recorded Edition or CRI. In the 1970s, Hovhaness started his own label, "Poseidon," issuing something like a dozen or twenty vinyl LPs in identical black-and-white sleeves. These Spartan records represented a handful of Hovhaness' many symphonies and a few other works. (The "Fra Angelico" fantasy for orchestra and the brass-and-percussion "Requiem and Resurrection" were two of them.) Beginning in the late 1980s, some of the independent compact-disc producers, particularly Delos and Koch, began issuing new Hovhaness recordings. Meanwhile, Peter Christ, the proprietor of Crystal Records, reissued the old Poseidon-label editions in the CD-format. Christ's project of transferring to the new medium Hovhaness' own recorded performances of his music now finds fulfillment in an audacious offering. Symphony No. 23 (1972), subtitled "Ani," belongs to a troika of symphonies that Hovhaness scored for symphonic wind ensemble. (Numbers four and seven are the others.) For his recording, he used two New Jersey college wind-bands, supplemented by a few professional players.* (According to the booklet, Gerard Schwarz, on trumpet, was one.) The "Ani" Symphony, in three movements, clocks in at a substantial thirty-eight minutes. "Ani" also strikes the ear as less radical than some of the other scores that Hovhaness produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s - than the "Vishnu" Symphony (No. 19, 1966), for example: it shows the composer in his neo-Renaissance mode, building up long polyphonic paragraphs in the manner of Giovanni Gabrieli, always flavored (of course) by his fingerprint Central Asian modes. In listening to this performance in its digitally re-minted form, one senses that Hovhaness must have been a charismatic man. How else, other than by mystical sympathy, could he have induced his amateur musicians to deliver so convincingly? (Think of the music that college bands usually play - "On Wisconsin"!) The Crystal engineers have worked from the master-tape, considerably enhancing the fusky sound of the old LP. The First Movement ("Adagio Legato Espressivo") alternates chorales and processionals, with various episodes for solo instruments - saxophone, flute, trombone. The Second Movement ("Allegro Grazioso") belongs mainly to the percussion, with the usual offbeat rhythms preferred by the composer; the xylophone has a prominent part near the end. The Third Movement ("Adagio Con Molto Espressione") repeats the structure of the First, but with new material and with a concluding (one might say, inevitable) fugue. The First and Third Movements both last about fifteen minutes in performance while the middle panel is about half that duration, so the effect is of two substantial sections balanced around a smaller interlude. The booklet apologizes for the acoustic of the recording-location (a college auditorium?), which does reverberate with a somewhat cavernous character - but this seems to me to serve rather than to undermine the music. A work for three flutes, "The Spirit of Ink" (1970), fills out the program. Flautist Samuel Baron plays all three parts by multiple tracking. While the main attraction is "Ani," "Spirit of Ink" is also worth getting to know. It has some delicate and some wild textures. Who knows whether anyone will record any of this music ever again? A new traversal of "Ani" with professional players recorded in-studio (incorporating the antiphonal brass choirs stipulated as "ad lib" in the score) would be welcome, but there would still also be something insuperable in Hovhaness' own interpretation of the work. Strongly recommended. [*P.S. - I believe that on the Poseidon LP, the combined college wind-bands were advertised as "the North Jersey Wind Ensemble."]"

"The worthiest creative art has been motivated consciously o

Crazy Fox | Chicago, IL USA | 06/12/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"America loves its mavericks, but it has taken a long time for the maverick American composer Alan Hovhaness to garner the recognition he so richly deserves. As he said in 1941, "It is not my purpose to supply a few pseudo intellectual musicians and critics with more food for brilliant argumentation, but rather to inspire all mankind with new heroism and spiritual nobility." The pseudo intellectual musicians and critics repaid his disdain in kind, but this uncompromising stance and sense of mission perhaps explains why among the many false starts and puzzling blind alleys of twentieth century classical music Hovhaness' work stands out for both its depth and listenability. Listenable and accessible, but far from simplistic--like the best music, it contains within itself a complexity that unfolds itself wondrously to the patient listener.



Admittedly I'm rambling a bit here, but the two pieces included on this CD and the oddity of their recording history exemplify what I've said. While "The Spirit of Ink" (1970) was indeed properly performed by a major flute soloist, Samuel Baron, the only folks Hovhaness could find to take up his "Ani Symphony" (1972) were two college bands--competent and hard-working (they clearly play their hearts out here) but not the kind of professional musicians that should've been given the task. Relatively ignored and sidelined by the musical establishment, though, this is what the composer had to resort to if he wanted his composition to be translated into sound at all. Still, Hovhaness himself was conducting them and interpreting his own music, which more than makes up for any minor infelicities. Both works spotlight the woodwinds: "Spirit of Ink" is a work for three flutes while the "Ani Symphony" is a wind symphony, granting what could've been a rather disparate set of selections some continuity.



The music itself is deeply moving, meditative and dreamlike in a strangely staunch manner that is quintessentially Hovhaness. The symphony is grand and melancholy, a kind of contemplative elegy for medieval Armenia's capital city with its many cathedrals--now but a long-uninhabited set of ruins all but forgotten. In that Hovhaness was exploring and expressing his Armenian roots here somewhat, the work has a significantly personal feel to it and yet vividly evokes those feelings in the listener as well. "The Spirit of Ink" is very different and demonstrates the composer experimenting with decidedly non-Western forms of music, clearly incorporating and reinterpreting the plaintive tones of Japanese shakuhachi music into his own idiom, and this successfully. Shrill and eerie, haunting and sparse, here is a strange musical beauty indeed.



The liner notes are properly detailed, discussing the context and musicological niceties of the two pieces (more so for the symphony especially) and the biographical background of the composer and the flute soloist. Some of Hovhaness' own reflections on the Ani Symphony (including a poem he wrote on the same theme) are also included, which adds an illuminating angle on the music he composed here. All in all, then, this is a fine CD re-release of a rare LP recording (properly remastered), a bit of an oddity perhaps but something that will definitely appeal to Hovhaness enthusiasts as well as anyone that loves fine classical music that's both challenging and rewarding, not to mention inspiring."