Customer Reviews

Louis Andriessen: De Stijl; M Is for Man, Music, Mozart

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

 

 

"De Styjl" is one of the great postminimalist, postmodern pieces. It combines funky horn riffs with boogie-woogie piano, and a bizarre choral overlay that somehow all works together. There is an almost Ivesian feel to the way, for example, the brass chugs away as the chorus seems to be off in a different harmonic world moving at its own rate. A whacky spoken interlude concerning Piet Mondrian (whose painting inspired "De Styjl") brings the work to yet another unexpected place and the whole thing finally gives way static series of isolated chords that wouldn't seem too out of place in the music of Luciano Berio, Andriessen's erstwhile teacher. The performance is committed but perhaps could, at times, swing a bit more.

I wish I could say something more positive about "M is for Man, Music, and Mozart." The music is, I think, trying to be charming but it ends up simply being cloying. I'm not qualified to judge the performance here which seems to be intentionally rough.

I agree w/klangfarben: "De Stijl" is a rollicking good time, yet also somehow haunting and slightly disturbing ... in a good way. =) The placement of the Mondrian monologue at the golden-section point of the piece just plain works -- exactly how defies description. Why is it even there?? Louis is not saying; maybe Piet can tell us... I'll have to remember to stare at some Mondrian and ponder this. Anyway, it's a fabulous, audacious piece, performed with muy cajones!

"M is for Man" on the other hand is schlocky, occasionally funny, but basically shallow & unsatisfying. Maybe it works better with the television graphics, but just on its own music-wise, esp. alongside "De Stijl", it falls flat. Fortunately "De Stijl" takes up the bulk of the disc, thus my 4-stars. What really irritates me about the recording though is: there is *NO* silent space at all between the end of the huge, 25-minute "De Stijl" and the beginning of "M is for Man"! We SOOOOO need time to digest "De Stijl" on its own & let it settle -- and most importantly to hit Stop before that other damn thing starts. :p

Do not attempt to listen to De Stijl if you don't want the most upbeat, contagious boogie-woogie tune in your head to make you dance for the rest of the week. Basso ostinato, canon, fugue, formal structure, Stravinski-influence--formal musical analysis could be put to use here, but anyone who thinks they've heard "classical" music before and listens to this piece will have to rethink some things.

I recently discovered that I own the only recording of Reich's Tehillim that allows the music to be as excellent as it actually is--namely the red one on the Cantaloupe label; the other two or three are so unfortunately recorded that, had I only heard them, I would have dismissed "The Desert Music" (presently my favorite recording in my collection) as a mediocre comoposition and been unable to recognize "Tehillim" itself as the work of genius it actually is.

To the point, I suspect that this recording of De Stijl suffers from the same flaw. The choral component of the composition sounds muffled.

Granted, Andriessen is a postmodernist and is full of awful ideas about what music should sound like, but the energy and clarity of the instrumental parts of "De Stijl" suggest to me that something has gone wrong in the process of performance and recording.

Of course, I doubt we'll ever have a second recording.

"M is for Man" etc. on the other hand was excellent, though (to my reading) it carries some fairly ideologically toxic implications about the nature of man and his place in the world. I dislike the style of singing which Andriessen has written for--"Blend the boundaries of high and low culture" jazz-influenced nastiness--but that's the condition of music in our century, I suppose.