Salonen:
Wing
on Wing
Foreign
Bodies
Insomnia
Finnish
Radio Symphony Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)
Deutsche Grammophon
Like Pierre Boulez, Esa-Pekka Salonen is a composer who took up
conducting to play his own works. Also like the Frenchman, he had such a genius
for it that he became much better known for his work on the podium conducting
the music of other composers than for his own creations.
Balance was restored for some listeners in 2001, when Sony released an excellent disc of Salonen conducting five of his compositions, most notably the exciting and brilliantly coloured LA Variations in which he conducted the orchestra who premiered it, the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Now Deutsche Grammophon has released a new disc of music that Salonen has composed since that first CD was recorded.
Like his fellow Finnish composer and friend Magnus
Lindberg, Salonen has created a style that uses the expressive resources introduced by Modernism but that should accessible and exciting to all but the most conservative listeners. Listen to the rhythmic vitality and fluorescent use of orchestral colour in "Body Language", the opening movement of Foreign Bodies, the first work on the programme. It lives up to its title by evoking physical movement so vividly that it's like ballet music. Pounding and violent it first, it dances its way through a dazzling range of tempos and textures, some of them illuminated by brief flashes of bright-timbred sound from bells and woodblocks.
The slow, soft-textured layering of sound in the first part of the second movement ("Language") that builds to eventually unleash a brief storm and the concluding, constantly-growing "Dance" with its initial delicate scoring and Minimalist accent gradually erupting into a reminiscence of the opening of the first movement both move gracefully and purposefully, with no time wasted.
In her note to this disc, Corinna Hesse quotes Salonen discussing biology and the origin of all music in movements of the body. But Foreign Bodies makes that point clearly enough without the explaining. Try to keep completely still while listening to the first movement.
Wing on Wing was composed in 2004 in celebration of the new Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and as an homage to its architect, Frank O. Gehry. In addition to the orchestra, its scoring includes two high sopranos, the architect's electronically sampled and modified voice, and the song of a fish, the plainfin midshipman, that lives in the waters off Southern California.
Judging from comments published on the amazon.com website, this is the work on the programme that has excited listeners the most. The weird sound of the fish, the stratospherically high melismas sung by the Komsi sisters, and the only intermittently intelligible voice of Mr. Gehry echoing through the orchestral writing do combine to create some extraordinarily beautiful effects. Listen to the music rise in a crescendo and then disintegrate into an echoing melange of chimes, rumbling percussion, and indistinct vocal sounds after 7:06, or the sudden appearance of ominous bass sounds and soprano voices over delicious Messiaen-like wind writing that explodes into an even more complicated orchestral/vocal/electronic mix at 13:45, and then becoming aurora-luminous after 15:00. Gorgeous stuff.
But for me, at 26 minutes it goes on a little too long. There are passages where, after music of the most intoxicating beauty, Mr. Gehry's droning voice becomes all too intelligible and the whole thing descends to earth. This may well be a case where recording can't do justice to the work as heard in a concert hall.
An Amazon correspondent named Grady Harp who heard the piece in concert wrote, "as fine as this recording is, there is nothing to compare the live performance of Wing on Wing in the hall for which it was written, a hall that has encouraged Salonen to place his forces throughout the building to reveal how even the smallest sound in the farthest corner can be heard with utmost clarity. But this comes as close as can be expected." A few months of additional listenings may make it clearer to me what excited so many people about this work, and inspired the DG people to give its title to the entire programme.
Throughout this programme, I kept noticing details that reminded me of the music of other composers. Messiaen, Ligeti, and John Adams all haunt Foreign Bodies, but Salonen's own voice is so strong that they are absorbed and have an enriching effect. In the opening pages of Insomnia the accents of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments and the manner of his later, Neoclassical ballets was so far forward that instead of surrendering to the music I found myself listening to hear who would turn up next. John Adams had his turn again (listen to the music after 4:30), Stravinsky again, this time Firebird, and so on for the first third of the piece. Later these references become less apparent, but as an evocation of the storms that start in the mind during a sleepless night, Insomnia pales beside Elliott Carter's solo piano piece, Night Fantasies. It's colourful and expertly made, but lacks the creative tension of Foreign Bodies and the best passages of Wing on Wing.
All of the composer-conducted performances sound committed and enthusiastic, and the recorded sound is superb.
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