Customer Reviews

Trans

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This is a wonderful CD with a tense, precise performance. Sections of the music are frantic and turgid, yet still carefully controlled. Hyla's music always seems ready to careen wildly out of control, yet always stops, comes back, ties together the divergent melodies and rhythms, and then drives on. The music is deeply informed by both the classical new music tradition and improvisational jazz, and brings the two together in an often harmonious clash.

Based on some of the promotion for this disc, a listener might be quite disappointed -- where's the jazz? the rock? the punk? It all sounds quite wild and exciting, complete with jagged honking and barking. For better or worse, Lee Hyla's compositions are nowhere near as eclectic as all that, and as brilliantly performed by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose, they can be much more plausibly compared to works by Elliott Carter, Roger Reynolds, and Olivier Messiaen.

Tim Smith in the "Concerto for Bass Clarinet and Orchestra" (1988 -- 10'52) is no doubt the source of the honking and barking. Not continuously, but at certain junctures. There are no long romantic cadenzas (someone should give that a try -- a romantic cadenza on bass clarinet!), but rather carefully structured exchanges with the clarinet as pivot for complex maneuvers by the orchestra. The title piece, "Trans" (1996 -- 18') is a maddeningly elusive work for orchestra in three movements. It opens with strong declamatory passages that remind me of Magnus Lindberg, fades into a more subdued central passage, and then unfolds the maximum of complexity in the third movement, reminiscent of Elliott Carter's orchestral scores.

Up to this point, Hyla has led the listener deep into the heart of a modernist vision, but with the "Violin Concerto" (2001 -- 24'22), he turns in a more accessible direction with a vivacious piece that to my ears is obviously influenced by Messiaen. There is a recurring theme in the brass that could have been lifted from the "Turangalila-Symphonie," and Hyla even uses percussion, strings and winds to create bird song! The jazzy effect of these elements is not avant jazz, but rather the Gershwinesque sort of jazz that Messiaen incorporated into his music in the 1940s. Quite a tribute, it is a puzzle that Messiaen is nowhere mentioned or credited in the title or liner notes. The violin, played by Laura Frautschi, sounds naive and pastoral, and is given several extended, mainly slow and expressive passages rather than lightning-fast features.

Lee Hyla, chair of the composition department at the New England Conservatory, clearly deserves greater recognition, and should be heard by all those devoted to contemporary music.