Search - George Antheil; Johanna Beyer; Henry Cowell; Ruth P. Crawford; Charles Dodge; David Mahler; Larry Polansky; Stefan Wolpe, Miwako Abe (violin); Michael Kieran Harvey (piano) :: Works for Violin by George Antheil; Johanna Beyer; Henry Cowell; Ruth P. Crawford; Charles Dodge; David Mahler, Larry Polansky, Stefan Wolpe

A mixed bag but an opportunity for fine discoveries

Discophage | France | 03/17/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Despite the annotator's efforts to draw some ties between the composers presented on this disc, there is hardly any stylistic relation between their respective pieces, whose dates of composition span over seventy years. Ruth Crawford's Nocturne from 1923 (an apprentice work) is a short (2:40) and unsubstantial piece of salon music. George Antheil's 2nd violin and piano sonata from the same year belongs to another class. With its companion the 1st sonata, it was commissioned by Ezra Pound for his mistress Olgar Runge, apparently a consummate violinist in her own right. Though Antheil, in his 1945 autobiography "Bad Boy of Music" (Bad Boy of Music (Paperback)) is rather dismissive about them, calling them "great empty chic", I find them daring, provocative, innovative and fun. The short (8'), one-movement 2nd is evocative of Ives in its mock use of popular American melodies and take-offs of tunes from the Grand Opera or the Vaudeville, its demented ragtimes. Of it Antheil wrote that the violin music represented the banal music of the past and present, and the piano the music of the future. It's not so simple, as the mockingly brutal onslaughts of piano pounding, so typical of Antheil's provocative style of those years, do manage to drag along the violin with them - a case of the bad boy corrupting the innocent maiden, maybe. The sonata ends with a simple, wistful, folk-like violin melody accompanied by drum - a reminiscene on Antheil's recent trip to Tunisia, and maybe a faint memory of the final pages of Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale. Abe and Harvey play the sonata acceptably (there are some spots of sour intonation from Abe, Harvey tends to over-pedall and thus rob the piano part of its desired crispness especially in the barbaric clusters of the section before last at 6:03, and Abe lacks sensuousness in the mesmerizing final "tunisian" page at 6:43, where two drums substitute for the piano), but it is more conveniently found, and better played, on a Montaigne CD with Antheil's Violin and Piano Sonatas 1 & 4 (George Antheil: Violin Sonatas 1, 2 & 4, see my review).



Henry Cowell's Sonata for Violin and Piano (1945) is a pastoral, relaxed work exuding a strong "prairie-style" atmosphere in the manner of Copland's most "American" pieces, but without the Brooklyner's unique personality. His four years at the San Quentin State Prison on charge of bisexuality had turned the ultra-modernist composer of the twenties into a conservative. The sonata is easy listening, but so much so that to me it sounds just trite. There is, though, in the finale at 3:58, a highly original moment with prepared piano, where the earlier, experimental Cowell shows his nose. It lasts 30 seconds.



On the face of her Suite for violin and piano from 1937, Leipzig-born Johanna Beyer (1888-1944) seems to be a highly interesting and original composer voice. A student of Cowell and Ruth Crawford from the time she moved to New York in 1924, she uses the technique of dissonant counterpoint invented by Crawford's husband, composer Charles Seeger. The Suite is austere and desperately vehement and sounds like Shostakovitch's violin and viola sonatas and even like the music of Shostakovitch's radical pupil, the maverick Galina Ustvolskaya.



Among the more recent compositions, the choice of two from Charles Dodge's set of Four Etudes for Violin and Tape (1994) is the one I enjoyed most. In Etude IV The violin melody is quite simple - a series of upward and downward arpeggios, really - but it comes over eerie and fascinating computer-generated sounds - wind through pipes and electronic chime-like sounds. The violin is more agitated in Etude II, with many gestures that belong to the traditional panoply of violin virtuosity (tremolos, scales, harmonics) but ends with a long phrase of intense lyricism. I rarely find the blending of traditional instruments and computer sounds convincing, but Dodge's music conjures a haunting and very personal sound-world, intensely lyrical at times, to make one regret that Miwako Abe didn't choose to record the complete set.



David Mahler's "Maxfield's Reel" (1983) is also quite fascinating with its obsessive repetition of first simple then increasingly complex melodic cells. The piece is constructed in imitation of the tape compositions (with splicing and looping effects) of Richard Maxfield (1927-69), a pioneer of electronic music.



Stefan Wolpe's "Second Piece for Violin Alone" (1966) is stark and un-seductive, and fortunately short (3 and ½ minutes) and Larry Polansky's 6-minute "Movement for John Cage" (1975 revised 1996), written in homage to Cage's 1947 "Nocturne" for violin and piano, is a stern quasi nocturne for violin and piano, with a short, more aggressive, dance-like passage at the end, of no great distinctive character.



Despite my reservations in Antheil, Miwako Abe - a Japanese woman violinist established in Australia - plays with fine tone and the duet she forms with Australian-born Michael Kieran Harvey seems well on top of the music. As usual with this label, the thorough and informative notes, with selected bibliography and discography, add much to the disc's value.



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