Customer Reviews

Louis Andriessen: Rosa - The Death of a Composer

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A curious but engaging libretto/scenario from Peter Greenaway, featuring labyrinthine turns of reference and plot that encompass serial murders, contemporary composers, sexual obsession, equine fondness, and Hollywood cinema westerns, only seems to sharpen Louis Andriessen's musical skills. Urgent phrasing, minimalist throbbing, and swirling developing melodies, orchestrated to the composers' unique taste in wind, brass, electric guitars and voices, makes for an addictive, flourishing, score, which works very well on CD. Andriessen throws in wild flourishes of jazz influence and wide, ranging, Western film music pastiche, but never sounds anything like the true original he is. This is highly recommended; if anything more coherent and complete than his major 'music theater' piece "De Materie" (a collaboration with director Robert Wilson). Teaming up with English arthouse filmmaker Peter Greenaway ("The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover")works well, and more is promised is promised from the duo ("Waiting for Vermeer" being a cited title). Meanwhile this remains an exceptionally fresh and edgy piece, tolling, trumpeting and snarling into the contemporary conciousness.

I love Andriessen... and I love Greenaway. Put the two together and let them run wild with excess and the result is -- problematic.

Greenaway's postmodern existentialism and semiotic obsessiveness is ill-suited to Andriessen's understated brashness and ironic impassivity. This is the wrong libretto for Andriessen's music, lacking the detached elevation of the classic and modern Dutch texts culled from 'what-not' sources for the composer's overwhelmingly successful De Materie. The out-of-place elevation of the texts in De Materie created just the right irony implicit in Andriessen's quasi-minamalist style. He even managed to jerk tears in Part IV.

But Rosa seems thrashed by its own postmodernism. Granted, the libretto and music are great on their own -- there's just something amiss in the wedding. The drama is slow-moving, compounded by the monolithic nature of Andriessen's granite-wall music, effective elsewhere, but cumbersome here. There is no charm or quietude, no respite... everything is lost in Greenaway's web of semantics.

The singing is far too declamatory. A great cast of singers are hardly given the chance to prove their merits... on rare occasion, we're given a glimpse at their prowess, then jerked back into ponderous monomorphous shouting.

Basic touches that make a recording 'clean' are missed altogether: like coordinated cut-offs. It's 'each man for himself' from end to end. Even the orchestra playing is littered with subtle insecurities, which, although not altogether damaging to Andriessen's mighty score, could have been remedied. The trouble, it seems, is that a perfectly clean recording would take decades to produce, given the complexity of music and enormous demands on the singers... a plus and a minus here.

And why not have the complete Index Singer scene? Cutting it short is a true waste, and an insult to some of Greenaway's best writing... I wouldn't mind paying for a 3rd overtime CD; which might have been filled out with more music by Andriessen, no?

Praiseworthy is the subtle change in Andriessen's style, which seems now filled with more pastiche and cutesy parody than ever. It should be interesting to see if this element 'takes over' in his upcoming output.

In short, I give this CD 4 stars because lovers of Andriessen and Greenaway should not ignore it... but fault it the 5th star for the slightly sloppy production and issues of artistic incompatability noted above. Not recommended to the uninitiated; they'd do better to start with De Materie, Andriessen's masterwork!