Hall of Mirrors
Percussive outbursts set against long Romantic lines, interrupted by snippets of Beethoven and Rossini, fragments of recorded bird calls and radio broadcasts, performers whispering, different musical languages interacting and colliding, a soprano in the balcony – all can be heard on this CD of works composed by one of today’s masters of musical collage and stylistic time-warp.
Elliott Schwartz’s music has been described as “beyond eclecticism” (Tim Page, New York Times), and lauded for its “ebullient personality… fertile imagina- tion and bright spirit” (Patric Stanford, Music and Vision). “Hall of Mirrors” is the title of one work on the disk – an extrovert- ed, free-wheeling suite for saxophone quartet and piano – but it could apply equally well to all four pieces recorded here, as numer- ous “mirrors” – echos, displaced registers, melodic and rhythmic variants, literal reflections, crazy fun-house distortions, and incur- sions from the real world beyond the concert hall – keep popping up within Schwartz’s overlapping textures. There is an Ivesian qual- ity to the way in which his seemingly incongruent, contrasting ma- terials appear in unexpected juxtapositions – all fusing together, however, to create a surprisingly consistent, singular language. Schwartz loves to walk the fine line between “music” and “theater.” Accordingly, three of the four pieces on this CD – Rain Forest with Birds (concert band and recorded bird sounds), Hall of Mirrors, and Crystal (piano and percussion) abound in theatrical gestures, making use of antiphonal-spatial placement of forces, performer- speech woven into the texture, and (in live performance) movement by the players and lighting effects.
Schwartz also enjoys exploring a wide range of brilliant instrumental color, as evidenced by his use of the saxophone quartet medium, exquisitely sensitive percussion timbres, and the stark contrasts of Kaleidoscope – what an appropriate title! – for violin, contrabassoon and piano.
The performances are all outstanding for their verve, spirit and virtuosity, and a number of the players, such as saxophonist Ken Radnofsky and contrabassoonist Hank Skolnick, are internationally acclaimed. The Radnofsky Quartet, Hoffman-Goldstein piano-percussion duo and Harvard University Band are well known for their pioneering commitment to new music and their many commissions to composers. All of these players dig into Schwartz’s polystylistic sound-scapes with energy and enthusiasm! Be prepared for a crazy- quilt fabric of Wagnerian harmonies, Cageian improvisation, found sounds, 12-tone pitch sources, and theatrical gestures, occasionally bouncing off one another and often fusing into something entirely new.
As David Cleary writes in the New Music Connoisseur, “what the 20th century needs most is an analogue to Brahms — someone who is able to gather up the widely scattered tendrils of this highly fractured 100 years and create a personal style from them… Elliott Schwartz is making a most persuasive bid to be that Brahms.”
