Customer Reviews

Flashbacks: Music by Mario Davidovsky

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Davidovsky's music is startling in its use of the opposites. Precision on the micro-level is frequently juxtaposed with spontaneous formal and dramatic designs. You will find yourself listening again and again to these works.

My first exposure to Davidovsky's non-electronic music was "Flashbacks" heard in concert a couple of weeks ago. I had to get the CD, and it substantiated my initial enthusiasm. The music is so fresh, so elementally sensuous that I could swear it requires no experience of Modernism, atonalism or other 20th century movements to hit home. All it needs is attentiveness. Davidovsky entertwines the textures and timbres of various instruments with the sensitivity of someone who might be delighting in them for the first time and enjoying the myriad combinations he could create. They are, in Mr. Sprout's eloquent phrase, "exquisitely explosive," the aural equivalent of delicious canapés exploding in the mouth after having been prepared by a master chef. And yet one leads to another, there is a structure connecting them, a forward momentum and unity in their variety. After listening, I experienced an emotion no other composition had ever inspired: "Flashbacks" made me feel lucky I had EARS.

Two other entries on this album are earlier, from the eighties, but it is the four from the nineties that are characterized by this revelatory freshness and sensuousness. Davidovsky said, in my concert program notes, that his electronic work gave him new insight when he returned to conventional instruments. Perhaps that sense of re-discovery is what I heard. My A list has included Reich, Ligeti Sr. and Wuorinen, but I intend to make room for more from Davidovsky.

Davidovsky's music is startling in its use of the opposites. Precision on the micro-level is frequently juxtaposed with spontaneous formal and dramatic designs. You will find yourself listening again and again to these works.