Search - Wallingford Riegger, Robert Whitney, Louisville Orchestra :: Wallingford Riegger: Variations / Sym No.4

Riegger at his most Schoenbergian

Discophage | France | 10/18/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I had enormously enjoyed the cross-section of Riegger's music presented on CRI's Riegger: Symphony No3, Romanza, Dance Rhythms, Music for Orchestra, Concerto for Piano and Woodwind Quintet, Music for Brass Choir, Movement for Two Trumpets Trombone and Piano, Nonet for Brass and naturally wanted to investigate more. Wallingford Riegger (1885-1961), one of the lesser known members of the group that in the thirties came to be known as "The American Five" and that included Ives, Cowell, Ruggles and the even more neglected John J. Becker (see The Louisville Orchestra-First Edition Encores and John J. Becker: Soundpieces 1 & 5 / At Dieppe / Concerto Arabesque), was among other things the introducer in the United States of Schoenberg's twelve-tone system. But he was also an ecclectic, and Riegger himself classified his own music in four categories: "non-dissonant (mostly)", "impressionist", "partly dissonant" and "dissonant".



This First Edition CD collates three Louisville recording premieres, of the Variations for Piano and Orchestra op. 54 from 1953, the similar Variations for Violin and Orchestra op. 71 from 1959 - two Louisville commissions, recorded shortly after their respective premiere, in mono sound - and the 4th Symphony op. 63 from 1956, recorded in stereo in 1964 (incidentally the disc's titles date the Violin Variations from 1960, contradicting the production information given in the liner notes. Maybe it is the year of publication).



Anyway, I ultimately found this disc highly interesting more than highly enjoyable, as it presents Riegger at his most Schoenbergian. Indeed, both sets of Variations, written in fairly strict serial technique, sound strikingly like Schoenberg's Variations opus 31. Within that style, uniquely Riegger's own mark I feel are the sardonic humor which most strikingly comes to the fore in the jazzy brass interjections of the Piano variation # 9 at 6:28 and in the final fugue at 11:52 (in which I hear a take off of "When Johnny comes marchin' home"), and the witty, perky and often sparse, chamber-music like orchestration of the Violin Variations (try the contrabassoon, tuba and flutes in variation 6 at 4:30 or the harp chordal interjections in the next one at 5:37) - although Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Webern loom large.



In these Schoenbergian similitudes lie I feel the compositions' interest but also their limitation. Besides Sessions, Carter and Rochberg, how many composers were there in the United States in the fifties who composed according to Schoenberg's method and idiom? So, now that the stylistic disputes and controversies of the times are a historical footnote, any of these American Schoenberg-inspired works would have at least the value of rarity and originality. On the other hand, not only will the music always sound somewhat derivative, but it is also, as the compositions of its inspirer, stern and demanding. It is certainly dramatic and I will not say that it lacks lyricism - on the contrary, the Violin Variations in particular are very lyrical, but it is a Schoenbergian, atonal lyricism, not immediately seductive - those who know Schoenberg's Violin Concerto will know what I mean. Appreciation of it is an aquired taste more than an instinctive one, I would say.



The 4th Symphony is more ecclectic and unpredictable. It starts in a pastoral mood, sounding incredibly like it could have been written alternately by Nielsen or Janacek, but soon evolves in more angular gestures, full of canonic developments that recall the late neo-classical Stravinsky of Agon and Symphony in Three Movements or, at times, Schoenberg again, and it veers back and forth in an apparently episodic manner (I don't have the score and cannot assess whether there is an underlying coherence to all these episodes), even balletic in the second movement (indeed based upon material drawn from a dance composed in 1936 for Martha Graham on the Spanish Civil War, hence the Spanish color of its middle section). The finale returns to the mood of the Variations, with a broad and stern melody canonically treated, later alternating between subtle woodwind filigree and grandiose brassy perorations (and also a perky march theme at 5:40 and again at 8:05). The late, turned-serial Stravinsky is the closest similitude I can come up with, but Riegger is very much is own. Again, this is not seductive music, but it is rich and rewarding on careful listening.



The mono Variations are somewhat distant and lack spatial bloom, with a hollow perspective in the Piano Variations and more depth in the Violin Variations, but, heard on headphones, a disagreable feeling of congestion in the first six variations that seems to point to fake stereo, and a strange change of sonic perspective after variation 7, the violin shifting left, or perhaps from (fake?) stereo to mono. The otherwise highly informative production notes (as usual with this label) are silent on this. Something also seems to have gone wrong with the remastering: the instrumental tone especially of the strings often sounds frazzled, as in a badly worn tape (I had remarked the same with First Edition's reissue of Mennin's Cello Concerto on Peter Mennin: Syms 5 & 6 / Cello Cto). Another not so welcome custom of this label is that the individual variations are not cued (the same happens in Variations and in Crumb: Variazioni, Echoes of Time and the River. The notes are the original ones from the LPs, by Riegger himself for the Variations and Klaus G. Roy for the Symphony, to which a general presentation and a few specific comments on the three compositions by John Kennedy have been added for the CD reissue. But Kennedy seems to have a wrong count of the variations. The description he gives for the Piano variation 8 actually refers to what is by my count variation 9 and for the Violin variations 4 to 6 pertain in fact to 5 to 7. This is how I have it:



Piano Variations: (1)0:35/ (2)1:05/ (3)1:54/ (4)2:47/ (5)3:41/ (6)4:15/ (7)5:13/ (8)5:44/ (9)6:28/ (10)8:12/ (11)9:16/ (interlude)10:04/ (12)10:45/ (fugue)11:52/ (coda)13:59



Violin Variations:

(1)0:38/ (2)1:13/ (3)1:50/ (4)2:46/ (5)3:27/ (6)4:30/ (7)5:37/ (8)7:38/ (9)8:38/ (10)9:59/ (11)11:38/ (12)12:33/ (cadenza)13:49/ (coda)15:11



The CRI disc is probably a better introduction to the music of Riegger, as it presents both a greater variety of styles and some compositions of great value. But this CD makes a fine complement; centered on the Schoenbergian side of Riegger, it completes the picture of one of the most original and undervalued 20th-Century American composers."