Here I an discovering (as you might also) Boston-area composer Arthur Levering. The recipient of numerous awards and professional accolades, Levering’s music is vibrantly textural and colourful, in a serious but engaging contemporary idiom. It has spectral overtones mixed with Schoenbergian atonal modernism, added to expressive and discursive gestures that are typically American, post-John Adams, say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s brilliant, intellectually satisfying, emotionally assertive and musically stimulating. OceanRiverLake<\/em> is a triptych based on water-evoking musical references in various topological forms. The first movement, as you may have guessed, evokes Debussy’s La mer<\/em>, without quoting it too explicitly. The second brings to mind Ives and Three Places in New England,<\/em> while the last evokes Schoenberg and his Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16<\/em>, the third of which is entitled Summer Morning by the Lake<\/em>. Levering is a very good orchestrator who knows how to deploy a multitude of sonic treasures with great refinement. It is a real pleasure to listen to his scores, played here with delicacy or vigour (depending on the movement) by the Boston Modern Orchestra conducted by Gil Rose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rest of the programme is made up of chamber scores, also beautifully constructed in colouristic, harmonic and textural terms. The surprising combination of Giocattolo<\/em>, for piccolo, guitar and celesta, turns out to be quite fortunate. The nine-minute work is a delicately detailed landscape shimmering with a soft light, full of deftly interwoven sonic peckings. A little gem of musical poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Squeezebox <\/em>for string quartet is a set of three miniatures inspired by Celtic music, evoking the sound of a concertina, an instrument in the accordion family. The string playing is cleverly constructed to evoke the \u2018breathing\u2019 of this instrument, without neglecting the melodic aspect associated with folklore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The programme ends with a suite in the form of a Theme and Variations for piano, Garland for Steven Stucky<\/em>. Here Levering pays tribute to a colleague and compatriot who died in 2016. In it he deploys his use of the principle of compound melody<\/em> (ausfaltung<\/em> in German, d\u00e9ploiement <\/em>in French). Stucky had expressed an interest in Levering’s use of this principle. This method can be described as the implication of more than one melody or line by a single voice by jumping between the notes of the two melodies. Some convincing examples exist in classical music: Bach’s Sonatas and partitas for solo violin<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the end, Garland for Steven Stucky<\/em> is a fairly advanced musical and conceptual exploration that sounds much better, narratively, than the hyper-theoretical aspect of the approach would suggest. It’s rigorous, of course, but musically rich and communicative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If Levering was unknown to me before the arrival of this production from the New Focus label, his music is now firmly imprinted in my mind. This top-notch album will have the same effect on you, if you love music at its best and most advanced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n