Customer Reviews

José Serebrier: Symphony No. 3 and other works

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Given all the great classical music that has been composed over
the centuries, it's not easy for a modern composer to find his or her
own niche'. Some resort to bizarre tonal structures or other contrivances
to sound "modern." The music that Mr. Serebrier, a well-known conductor,
composed for this CD, sounds fresh and contemporary, but he doesn't overdo
trying to sound modern. Rather the technique he uses on a number of
tracks is to emphasize the strings to create a atmosphere of mystery,
mystery to provoke the listener to go into a meditative state of
psychological reflection.

Much of the time his style works very well, as on the 10th track,
"Momento psicologico." In other instances, like the second and third
movements of his newly composed third symphony, I felt that the mood
was too meditative, too repetitive in that sense. Yet the first movement of
the symphony is a real "grabber," and the final movement, with a beautiful
female singing arrangement, is very fine, and leaves you fulfilled with the
work. Perhaps if I had the opportunity to hear this piece performed live
I would realize that it is wholly great. Finally, I found the intensity of
mood perhaps labored to the point of brooding in the last 2 pieces, which
are ironically dedicated to couples who are close friends of the composer -
one would think they might be uplifting to symbolize friendship! Maybe this
is the composer's giving voice to the quiet angst many feel in these
(troubled) times.

This CD is also like a "greatest hits" of the composer. It contains
an amazingly mature work he composed when he was only 14, "Elegy for
Strings," while the third symphony discussed above was composed 50 years
later. In addition to these works, the CD contains a very well-composed
and performed 2-movement composition for the accordion, which the composer
states he had never composed for. This spatial piece, again also including
the strings for "inner reflection," would make a great soundtrack for an
old-style, romantic, European movie!

My compliments again to Naxos for making their fine recordings
reasonsably priced, so that it's worth taking a chance on CD's that
seem appealing but not worth the risk for the high price other labels
charge, which for me discourages experimenting. This CD is definitely
worth the higher price in my opinion, but you don't have to pay it! It
surely deserves the Grammy nomination it has received.

José Serebrier is a well-respected conductor and one of the more starry names in the Naxos catalogue. It is thus perhaps for contractual reasons that Naxos has proceeded to record some of his output as a composer, for these generally dreary, brooding works have little to recommend to them apart from keeping a good conductor in the company's rooster. The early Elegy, written when the composer was fourteen, sets the tone - it is surprisingly skillful for a fourteen year old, but doesn't stand if evaluated on purely musical terms. The Momento psicológico is representative of the mature composer, with its restrained, elegiac drama and utter lack of anything even remotely memorable, virtually indistinguishable from the equally dull Fantasia. The Passacaglia and Perpetuum Mobile is, unusually enough, scored for accordion and chamber orchestra, and pretty much realizes all worries one might have in advance concerning what a mediocre, conventionally oriented contemporary composer could do with such a setting.

The third symphony was, according to the composer, completed in a weak - which would have been an admirable feat if it hadn't sounded like it was. It consists of an energetic first movement, undistinguished but finely orchestrated, followed by three brooding, meandering slow ones (leading one to suspect that the composer's general idea was that it takes shorter time to fill out pages with arbitrary dots if it is supposed to be played slowly than if it were to be played fastly), employing, predictably enough, a chorus in the final one.

There are a couple of other works, but I don't think there is much point in going on. The performances are of course authorative, the technical adeptness of the players never in doubt - they make what they can of it - and the sound quality is fine. But this is a lost cause, and if Serebrier is to go on composing music, can no one at least tell him that starting a work slowly in the low strings is generally a bad idea, at least if you do it more or less all the time.