Customer Reviews

Rochberg: Works, Vol. 1 (CRI American Masters)

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This CD contains some of Rochberg's early works: i.e. before he turned retro. The two chamber works are interesting, but the grand prize here is the Symphony #2, one of the few great American symphonies of the now nearly defunct 20th century. The New York Philharmonic, plays brilliantly under Werner Torkanowsky, hitting a grand slam in what seems to have been his only time at bat in the majors.

The symphony is strong and colorful, brimming with muscularity and self-confidence. One wonders what Rochberg would have produced had he not turned onto the path of neo-romanticism.

Serialist compositions have an abstract expressionist character that makes them seem cold, dry, forbidding, and even arbitrary. This is an inevitable result of the style and the system employed in their creation, which leans heavily to the intellectual and systematic. It is also why this style is so effective and appropriate to the twentieth century - these feelings are the essence of the spirit of the times.

George Rochberg is one of the most successful of the serialists. He has demonstrated both a thorough understanding and mastery of the system in his early works, and the ability to transcend the limitations of the form when they no longer served his artistic goals. Rochberg's lyrical sense allowed him to express a broader than usual range of feeling within the constraints imposed by the serialist method, but he ultimately had to leave the method behind as too restrictive.

The opening bars of the earliest work on this disc, the String Quartet #1, could easily be mistaken for those of a late Romantic slow movement. (It's as if Mahler had tried to write chamber music.) It gradually descends into dissonance through a seemingly logical progression, and then builds into an energetic statement of purpose.

Rochberg's Symphony #2 opens with martial alarms, staccato trumpets and drum tattoo. Written in the heat of the cold war, the aggressive attitude gradually breaks apart and becomes playful. New melodic elements are introduced and the music is gradually transformed (as perhaps the composer hopes the world will be). The opening material recurs but feels less ominous and threatening in the later context provided for it.

There is no doubt that that second movement is meant to be a scherzo - a joke. It tries very hard to be funny but it is not humorous; it is a serious effort to grab your attention. The third movement, "molto tranquillo," brings some lyricism but sounds thin, as the restrictions of the tone row do not allow deep harmonies to be formed. Dissonance is avoided here at the cost of limiting the number of voices.

The moods expressed by the Symphony all seem to revolve around alienation. The piece holds together very well and the last movement brings together many of the diverse elements and feelings developed in the rest of the piece. Here, fast and slow elements are juxtaposed, with contrasts between heavy and light. The piece ends on a quiet note and seems somehow inconclusive.

The last piece (chronologically) is the elegiac Contra Mortem et Tempus, written after the death of Rochberg's son in 1964. The work is an "assemblage" with (so say the notes) quotes from Boulez, Ives, Varese, and Rochberg's own works. It is, like the other works here, a study in contrasts with long notes from the flute or violin held against short notes from the percussion (the piano) which also supplies the element of rage with occasional violent outbursts. The quieter lines give the piece an ominous, spooky character, as do the flutter-tongue accents and those passages where the pianist strikes or strums the strings with the hands. Towards the middle of the piece the winds play fast rising motifs which suggest flowers popping out of the ground, or birds. At the end, the pianist half-sings, half-whispers the title of the work into the piano, bringing things to a solemn close.

Although Rochberg has always been well known among his peers and the cognoscenti, the small number of generally available recordings has limited his exposure to the general public. Until recently, not one of his symphonies or string quartets had been released on compact disc. Composers Recordings must be praised for bringing these works back into wider circulation. This is the first of two discs of Rochberg from this label. (The second has the String Quartet #2 and other chamber works.) The last four quartets are now available on CD from New World Records.

The First String Quartet dates from 1952 and the Second Symphony from 1955-56. Back then, Rochberg (as quoted in the liner notes) said that "Schoenberg left much yet to be done", having "openened a vast unexplored area in which creative personalities can yet stake their claims". The String Quartet is a mixture of Berg's Lyric Suite (but with less lyricism and more thorny angles) and Bartok (with more thorny angles). It is tense and dense, and alternates between brooding and questing (with moments of agonized lyricism, especially in the third movement) to wild and furious. The recording was made in 1975 and sounds excellent.

Wild and furious: this is also the mood at the beginning of the Second Symphony. It is a fully-fledged and unapologetic twelve-tone composition - but it has none of the dryness sometimes associated with Schoenberg's method. It may sound aggressive, forbidding and "difficult" to ears not attuned to contemporary, but it develops tremendous enery and dramatic power, rising to almost unbearable levels in the finale. It is one of the best specimens among the American symphonies composed in the twelve-tone method, less cerebral and more visceral than those of Sessions for instance. Recording date not given: sources on the net indicate that it was financed by a 1961 grant from the Walter Naumburg Foundation - wrongly typed "NaumbErg" in the booklet - and made circa 1962; it too sounds very good.

By the early 1960s, Rochberg began to chafe at what he felt were the expressive limitations of serialism. As quoted again in the liner notes, "the overintense manner of serialism and its tendency to inhibit physical pulse and rhythm led me to question astyle which made it virtually impossible to express serenity, tranquillity, grace, wit, energy. It became necessary to move one." The shattering loss of his son, in 1965, at a time he was already questioning the direction of his music, gave him the final spur to embrace new aesthetics. CONTRA MORTEM ET TEMPUS (against death and time) for flute, clarinet, violin and piano from 1965 was his act of mourning. It is a highly experimental work, using pianistic techniques usually associated with George Crumb (like striking notes while the strings are manually damped to produce a sound similar to the toll of a bell, or whispering the words of the title into the piano's strings) and quotations from other experimentalist composers such as Ives, Varèse, Boulez and Berio. It traverses a variety of moods, from the mysterious and "transcendental" quasi-Crumb utterances to explosive and jagged outbursts. Not seductive, but a fascinating and moving statement. The recording from 1967 sounds fine.

Makes you want to hear more Rochberg - serial or not.