Search - Edgard Varese, Pierre Boulez, Ensemble InterContemporain :: Varese: Arcana; Ameriques; Ionization; Offrandes; Density 21.5; Octandre; Integrales

Incredible.

David Lee | Canada | 05/25/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is one of the finest set of recording of the Varese repetoire ever made. The french performances are particularly well done with right degree of ensemble and tone required of this difficult music. The Octandre is especially good with super attacks from all players...not for the faint of heart."

Art and Sound - the Brave New World of Varèse

Doug - Haydn Fan | California | 11/11/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Reading the other Amazon reviewers left me wondering - has anyone here any idea at all what's involved in Varèse? Back in the 1920's, when most of these works were created, Varèse's compositions stepped quite decisively out of the the world of classical music - indeed, music of any form - and into a new found artistic universe, where abstract rules of construction would dominate. Calling Varèse a musician is fair only to the extent he works with musical instruments and retains musical notations - in fact he's much better described as a painter or sculpture working in sound! This is not to suggest Varèse was not a genuine musician to his fingertips - he had exceptional talent in what might be described as 'regular music', choral works, accentuation, etc. But once this fundamental distinction about the totality of his vision is grasped the breadth of Varèse's accomplishments can begin to be understood. The normal apparatus of music criticism, especially as it existed in Varèse's time - when the compositions on recorded on this Cd were being put together - simply did not function when confronted by these striking creations.



Thus, what we have is a radically new sensibility, something Varèse's namesake Edgar Poe might have admired - a world where the lines between the visual and the aural begin to merge, twist, and conflict in all together newly discovered combinations. We do not so much hear a work by Varese as we experience it physically - the powerful and sudden fortes and climaxes in many of his works are meant to act not just architecturally, but also directly on the senses, quite independently of any role they might have in the composition. Musical quotations should be 'seen' as a landscape much the same way visual quotes function in a work by Jasper Johns or Rauschenberg, where multiple and overlapping images from a variety of normally unassociated sources act to undercut or open up new vistas. Varèse's admiration for all the arts - he was a big admirer of the cubist Braque - as well as his uncanny ear for concrete everyday sounds, such as the sound of waves lapping against a pier, or the shattering melee of urban traffic volumes, emerge naturally into musical cityscapes with a hither-to-fore unknown reality and forcefulness.



The astonishing fertility of this artist remains little appreciated even to this day. All of the works on this Cd are striking achievements in a totally new path - they are both manifestoes and final statements. Not since the days of Vivaldi had music been presented with such an extreme emphasis on what might to most musicians be termed secondary or amusical elements - color for color's sake; pure, unadorned volumes that cannot be distinquished from noise; bizarre contrats and groupings running over any and all formalized elements of Western polyphony and harmony. Offrandes, written in 1921, a deceptively short but ground-breaking work, brushes lightly past the over-contructed bridge to nowhere of Schönberg's Pierrot lunaire with an absoluteness impossible to quantify - the soprano sings quite freely of any musical constraints or requirements, freed of the chains of the past.



Varèse felt systems such as Schönberg's could only limit; with Amériques the artist puts his new vision to a full test and succeeds beyond any possible measuring standards of his day. A fully realized new concept is put into place, presented, and the established directions of music can no longer continue without recognizing what has happened. Within another year Varèse produces yet a further landmark on his newly discovered continent, Octandre, superficially a retrogression, with elements of more conservative formula and musical writing, but by the finsih of the three short movements, all around two minutes, very little is left of any connection to the past. A subtly subversive little work, and one displaying extremely nice writing for woodwinds.



Intégrales emerges into view in 1924. For me this is one of Varèse's most stunning works - I've listened to it innumberable times, and it's always an overwhelming experience. Varese manipulates traditional musical relationships into an entirely unexpected sum, where the frantic fragments miraculously are transformed into a unity, a sum far greater than the parts, a work of total wholeness.



It's not surprising Varèse's next major orchestra work, Arcana, rarely was played in his day - it requires an orchestra far larger than even Richard Strauss' Elecktra! We can thank that contemporary champion of modern music, Leopold Stokowski, for giving Arcana its premiere in Philadelphia way back in April, 1927! Bravo, Leopold! One can only wonder what those staid Philadelphia season ticket holders thought about Stokowski's latest voyage into the unknwon reaches of modern music! I suppose the Philadelphia musicians didn't wear earcovers to protect their hearing, as they did for a later premiere of George Crumb. Arcana is thrilling, wildly engaging music, in the pounding undertows of life as it most deeply registers to the ultra sensitive barometer of exploding possibilites Varèse must have been in the Roaring Twenties. A grand, magnificent orchestra work - unique, bold, undaunted by Time.



The last work I'll briefly mention - Ionisation, 1931. The work is wholly modern, quite removed now from any lingering connection to the past or even contemporary music of the time. It could just as easily appeared a quarter century later, during the height of Abstract Expressionism, and been viewed as radical!



The performances here are from Boulez's first recordings of this music made with the New York Philharmonic, or with selected intrumentalists. The playing is razor sharp, and highly informed. Boulez understands Varèse to a fare-thee-well - he has no trouble with the density of the supersized orchestra works, such as Ameriques or Arcana, eliciting from his orchestra tremendous rocking force when required in Varèse's demands for explosive uproar. Pitch, always a Boulez speciality, is a quality one might think of lesser importance in some of the perplexing sound world of these huge works, but Boulez applies it with his usual keen ear to the finest degree, and this is marvelously done in the smaller works - though to call any work by Varèse 'small' is a misnomer, both in quality and general scale!



A landmark in modern Art, not just music!



























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