Customer Reviews

Rituals for Orchestra

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I'm afraid I can't recommend this disk, nor can I say what the music is like on this. Clearly, the CD is out of print, but you should exercise caution with this disk--as well as other CDs from the CRI imprint. I have purchased three copies (two new, one used) and all three will not play on any CD player or computer that I have tried. Given that I have similar problems with a second CRI recording, I believe the cause is a poorly mastered disk, although manufacturing problems or other difficulties may be at fault. Every copy of this disk I have tried has failed to play back on the last two tracks.

It's a pity, given that Mr. Shapey's music is generally quite good and deserves better than this.

Shapey's gaze at the world is not a pleasant one, it is one filled with negativity and pestilence. His musical gestures come from the spontaneous anarchic of the romantic spirit, but in Shapey's case fused and indoctrinated with a conviction to preserve the language of music in modernity.He has an intense concern in the human condition,but places the vigours of art well above that. He would never abandon his modernist creativity for instance, for a sense of social realism.His use of text always serves his musical aesthetic placing the text at the service of the musical discourse,rather than respecting the integrity of the text at the expense of the musical structures the opposite. His powerful music amply fills the spaces they inhabit usually framed within the classical canons of form;Sonata-revisited, Duets,Trios, reiterations,endless returning of music materials only rethought,with commentary,lament,dialogue,and violence.He has rendered his music as a sonic sculpture,pitting ensembles against each other in dramatic antiphonal displays. Rituals is somewhat an example of all these creative values only more direct, more aggresivily one-dimensional than his other works where the aesthetic has higher conceptual agendas at work, as the late String Quartets or the various Evocations.The conceptual intent here in Rituals is a primordial one, Shapey's endless aesthetic pursuit of eternal ways of making art is important to him.And here Rituals explodes with impenetrable chordal statements all with cell-like pitch structures reiterated, impacted in dense orchestrations,yet resolving reducing itself at times to single lines. Shapey's music has intellectual dimensions,again an affinity with modernity, but the very real experience of his music is direct,unencumbered,intense,explosive and unrelenting. In Rituals here there is a section given over to the "free spirits" a group of improvisors led unofficialy by Rich Fidoli,long an inspiring saxophonist on the Chicago scene and is given free reign to wail. The Covenant is Shapey's (for want of a better term) spiritual music,liturgical from the Old Testament perspective. This is a rerecording of the work, much better with some time for reflection, than the earlier CRI recording in September,1981. Again there are wonderful Chicago musicians here committed to the Shapey cause, well versed in this arduously complex musical language. The work is in four sections, all with a solo soprano part that sings in an anxiety-ridden like voice, pointillisitic, jumping registers,not really melodic. I personally don't admire the voice in this way, it becomes strictly another instrument foreclosing on its historical vocal power of straightforward singing, sustained and soaring tones with a bel canto content. There is a sensual and primordial quality that I think Shapey had missed here with the voice(Boulez and Carter also reveal a lack of understanding of this dimension of thevoice,at least in their compositions Berio understands what I refer to), So direct communication is foreclosed.But then that is part of the modernist canon for the voice. Adorno once said a price is always paid for innovation. The text is adapted from various sources American and European,to forge a brideway of ideology from Walt Whitman,Pierre Louys to the Old Testament to inscriptions on walls of Jews escaping from the Nazis.The ultimate power of these three works is having Shapey himself conducting. In fact respected conductors always seem to have emergencies when contracted to conduct Shapey's music, as Barenboim in Chicago or Oliver Knussen and Dennis Russell Davies.Shapey's conviction and sense of rhythmic precision knows few equals.

I've been exploring the music of Ralph Shapey in recent months. Until this recording, I'd been listening to chamber music and had generally been quite impressed. This CD of music for orchestra and voice with large ensembles was a considerable disappointment. It's hard to see how the composer of the marvelous violin music (recently recorded by Miranda Cuckson Music By Ralph Shapey) could be the same as the composer of this indulgent mess. All of the worst attributes of music of the 60's and 70's are on display here--chaotic jazz riffs, non-existent 'ritual' ceremonies, non-synchrony of events. The level of expression appears to be directly related to the loudness of the orchestra. The effect rapidly becomes tiresome and ever so dated. Quality of performance isn't an issue--some of the finest performers of the day were in front of the microphones. But it just wasn't worth the effort.