Customer Reviews

Richard Danielpour: Elegies - Sonnets to Orpheus / von Stade, Hampson, Huang

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Lovely lyrical writing opens American composer Richard Danielpour's Elegies for mezzo-soprano, baritone and orchestra. Heavily influenced by the music of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten, Danielpour's music is representative of the reactionary trend away from the twin worlds of dissonant, hypercomplex music and aleatoric, chaotic music of the academic world from the 1950's through the 70's. Danielpour, a graduate of the Julliard School of Music, composes music which is primarily melodic and whose harmonies are derived from an in-depth knowledge of tonality, even if that tonality is often expanded beyond romantic norms. The second movement, Lacrimosa, especially calls to mind Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, and the final movement, In Paradisum, suggests the ending of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs.

The performances on this CD are uniformly gorgeous. The Perspectives Ensemble and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, both led by conductor Roger Nierenberg, provide superb support for the vocal soloists. Mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, baritone Thomas Hampson, and soprano Ying Huang wonderfully complement Danielpour's lyricism with their vocal gifts. In fact, von Stade contributes quite a bit more to this CD than just her singing talent; the genesis of Danielpour's Elegies began with the singer. Frederica von Stade's father was killed in World War II, before she was born, and she had longed to know him, but the only way for her to do so was through the reminiscences of others and the letters he had written to his wife. She suggested to conductor Roger Nierenberg that a song cycle based on those letters be composed; Nierenberg suggested Danielpour; and Danielpour enrolled poet Kim Vaeth to adapt those letters into a musically useful form. How those adaptations derive from the original letters is not at all clear from the information given, however.

The companion work to Elegies is Danielpour's setting of Rainier Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, for soprano and chamber ensemble. This piece is quite similar to the first work, although a bit more light-hearted in places, and Chinese soprano Ying Huang performs beautifully. Her enunciation of the English texts even surpasses that of American Frederica von Stade. Ying Huang may be known to audiences from her performance in the title role of Frédéric Mitterrand's 1995 film of Puccini's Madame Butterfly. Unfortunately the names of the other musicians are not provided--in particular the french horn player deserves mention.

Listeners may notice that the actual climaxes of this very dramatic music are performed exclusively by the orchestra, and the vocalists do not participate. This is the one criticism I have of the works--Danielpour's vocal writing is certainly exquisite, but he seems to undercut the drama of his music somewhat by omitting any real vocal climax. Other listeners may also find that too much of the CD is introspective in nature, but given the subject matter of the works contained this seems inevitable. Regardless of these minor criticisms, this is a wonderful disc, and I will be listening to it repeatedly.

I am the artistic director of the Perspectives Ensemble, which performed the Sonnets to Orpheus by Richard Danielpour on the Elegies/Sonnets Sony CD. Regrettably, Sony did not include the names of our individual musicians in the program booklet. Thank you to the reviewers who enjoyed our performance and commented on that omission. The musicians are: Diane Walsh, piano; David Jolley, french horn; Erica Kiesewetter and Adela Pena, violins; Nardo Poy, viola; Julia Lichten, cello; Jordan Frazier, bass; Sato Moughalian, flute; Alan R. Kay, clarinet; Paul Hostetter, percussion.

Richard Danielpour has carved himself a special place in contemporary music. He has won just about every award there is, and has attained a recognition seldom matched by a living American composer. Most of the performances of his music are done by mainstream ensembles and soloists on programs with more standard repertoire rather on specifically "new music" concerts. A major record label granted him exclusivity and exposed his productions to worldwide fame.

Part of Danielpour's success is due to the peculiar relationship he entertains with the past. He does not feel the need to distance himself from tradition, nor does he follow it blindly. His music reenacts a bygone era when newly produced music dominated the old and encompassed it as an ancillary part. For him, it is only natural that living musicians should accede to stardom status: it has always been the new, the young and the contemporary who have captured the imagination of the people more than any dead composer could.

The two compositions recorded on this album both display the same elegiac quality with respect to the past. Both depict a journey to recover a lost memory and are a testimony to the persistent presence of the dead among the living. In Elegies, Mezzo-Soprano Frederica von Stade honors the father she never knew by bringing to life letters that he wrote to his wife during the war. In Sonnets to Orpheus, Soprano Ying Huang interprets Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry with an impressive range of skills.

True to the myth of the Greek poet who follows his lost lover beyond death and brings her back from below, the composer gathers materials from the past and rearranges them with his lyre to create a sense of community between the present and the dead.

This CD dates from 2001, around the time when Danielpour was something of a media daarling. One can hear why. To the immense relief of audiences and symphony boards, his idiom takes barely more effort to listen to than Holllywood soundtracks -- a disparaging critic called it Shostakovich mixed with Disney. (The same relief greeted Samuel Barber decades ago.) The melodic lines are gratifyingo to singers, and there have been many comparisons to Richard Strauss's lavish use of the orchestra and voluptuous moods.

Has the music held up? Is it beautiful or merely attractive? For me, the closest comparison to the massively orcchestrated song cycle, "Elegies," is Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony, and both depend on Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. It's no shame that Danielpour's effort lags considerably behind those two predecessors, but listeners with modern ears might object that he hasn't gone a step further in harmony. Not that many listeners have modern ears, so they will be happy to hear an "hommage" to the past, as we can politely call it in order to avoid the term "reactionary."

The previous reviewers have sung the praises of Von Stade and Hampson, who certainly throw their hearts into the music. Even though the language is English, I cana't understand a word of Von Stade's singing; one has to marvel at the freshness of her voice at age 55, though. Hampson, always excellent in his English diction, does far better, but even he is sometimes defeated by Danielpour's gaudy orchestral textures. The major climaxes are saved for orchestra alone. I found this work easy to assimilate in its elegaic tenderness -- the theme is a father and daughter communing across time -- but the verse is negligible and after ten minutes I coulld barely recall the music, not the case with Strauss and Zemlinsky. Danielpour seems to fall back upon one generic style: the steady outpouring of melody, usually not inspired, backed by raucous, showy orchestral events that could apply to any text to equal effect.

The Sonnets to Orpheus is a setting of Rilke's masterpiece, and I msut agree with an astute early reviewer who points out that the poet's enigmatic mystico-philosophical idiom doesn't seem like a natural fit with Danielpour's up-front splashes of color and quasi-film socre harmonies. If you've heard Barber's "Summer: Knoxville 1915," youv'e heard a more assured, melodic, haunting version of this socre. Here the reduced forces of a chamber ensemble (a hndful of strings and winds anchored to the piano) is more interesting than "Elegies" because more intimate. Avoiding overblown orchestral effects is a plus. Rilke's verse has been put into English, yet soprano Ying Huang doesn't articulate well enough to deliver more than scattred phrases at a time.

Overall, Danielpour's handling of voice and instruments is skillful and effetive. I didn't come away thinking I'd solved the issue of beautiful vs. attractive, but Danielpour's music holds its own while you're listening to it.