|
Color and upbeat driving energy, plus plenty
of the other forward
qualities, characterize Ronald Caltabiano’s music
and especially his
Sonata for Solo Cello. The earliest work
on this disc, completed in
June 1982, it was written when he was in his early
twenties (he was
born in 1959) and still a student at The Juilliard
School. He was
about to embark on a year with Elliott Carter as his
teacher, though
he seems to have already learned from Carter’s music
how to create a
physical sense of movement in fully chromatic music, a
sense that
comes from the composer’s and the listener’s
shared conviction that
the right notes are happening in the right register at
the right time.
You feel that each gesture goes in the only way it could
go—but then
part of how the music progresses is by finding other
ways. The titles
of the sonata's two movements,
“Transformations” and “Variations,"
indicate the importance of this principle of altered
similarity, which
can be heard in a very direct way in the recurrences of
one simple,
urgent motif in the first movement (at 45", 2'
33", and 3' 53"). This
is the trick of making deliberate decisions (to repeat)
in ways that
sound non-deliberate: natural, inevitable, part of the
music’s growth.
Caltabiano uses that trick in another way by his
combination of
quasi-serial operations with a small-interval
melodiousness that can
suggest plainchant (especially where there are repeated
notes) or even
American folk or popular song. In other words, Modernist
abstraction
works freely and easily with a recovery of older, simpler
musical
values, especially those musical values inherent in the
human voice.
Rather curiously, vocal music forms only a small part of
his output to
date. [As this CD is in production, Caltabiano's chamber
opera,
Marrying the Hangman, to a text by Margaret Atwood, has
been premiered
in Great Britain, and a new song cycle for soprano,
flute, and harp,
also with an Atwood text, is nearly completed.] While
none of the
pieces on this CD is vocal, they are all full of patterns
that could
be sung. Again the first movement of the cello sonata
shows this: Fast
sections alternate with slower, lyrical passages, the
latter
increasing in length and variety as the former become
ever more
compact. The big declamation at the start of the movement
is reduced
to a figure using just seven notes, while the andante
music, which at
first is a single note (A) with decoration, grows into
pentatonic
melody, whose chromatic additions fall away to leave, at
the end, a
pure pentatonic theme inherited from Alexander
Tcherepnin. (The sonata
was commissioned by the Tcherepnin Society for the fifth
anniversary
of Alexander’s death.)
The second movement is in six sections, of which the
first should
perhaps already be regarded as a variation, since it
fluidly sets out
some characteristic intervals, shapes, and harmonies
rather than
projects a finished theme. But besides offering something
new, this
movement is also a replay of the first. The
“intervals, shapes, and
harmonies” of its opening sequence come from the
andante music of the
first movement, and their tempo is the same. The next
three sections
stay at that tempo: the second is a melody with pizzicato
accompaniment, the third pure melody in quicker notes,
the fourth more
in the style of the first, but with the long notes played
without
vibrato rather than as harmonics, and with jerky
interrupting figures
performed sul ponticello. The fifth section is faster,
and—surprisingly but satisfyingly—it
reintroduces elements from the
allegro music of the first movement, including the
declamation already
mentioned. Then, in the last section, that declamatory
music returns,
at its original tempo. What had slowly disappeared in the
first
movement is now fully restored.
Almost a decade separates the cello sonata from Concertini
(1991),
written in the period during which Caltabiano completed
his studies
and started a teaching career that led him from New York
by way of
Hong Kong to San Francisco, for whose Symphony the new
piece was
written (though what is recorded here is a chamber
version with solo
strings). During that time he gained experience in
writing for larger
ensemble and orchestra, but many essential features of
his work
remain: the music’s growth by repeated new
departures, its strong
construction, its reworking of motifs from section to
section, its
variety of vivid characters, its strains of quasi-vocal
melody.
Within Concertini's ten movements are connections the
composer has
partly identified: “Raucous rumblings of the first
movement are made
more linear in the introspective Andante piacevole that
follows. The
intervals of the third movement’s rhythmic brass
chorale are followed
by a more melancholy treatment in the Andante moderato.
Material first
presented by strident and insistent winds in movement V
also appears
in VII, tutti sections, and in VIII, with maniacal
obsession. A
lyrical contrapuntal web of sound (VI) is later clarified
in greater
tranquility (IX). The kaleidoscopic finale allows echoes
of all
previous movements.” Meanwhile the title is
justified in that each
movement is a little concerto—sometimes a concerto
for orchestra,
sometimes featuring a soloist or group: bassoon with
piano and low
strings (I), brass quartet (III), piccolo, oboe, and E
clarinet (V),
violin (VI), violin and viola (VII), or trumpet (IX). The
feeling of
continuity through the ten concertini comes not only from
alternations
of character and on motivic relationships (reinforced in
the finale by
the reappearance of the timpani, unheard since movements
I and III),
but also on large rises and falls in register. Such
shifts had also,
on a smaller scale, helped enliven the sections of the
cello sonata;
here they create a general curve of ascent (I through V)
and slower
descent.
Caltabiano dedicated the ten movements of Concertini to
ten composers
he admires, including three of his teachers: Carter (II),
Peter
Maxwell Davies (the only non-American, III), and Vincent
Persichetti
(in memoriam, IX). The others are George Perle (I),
Donald Martino
(II), Charles Wuorinen (IV), Ellen Zwilich (V), Jacob
Druckman (VI),
John Adams (VII), and Ned Rorem (X). In no evident sense
are these
composers or their styles portrayed in the respective
movements: the
homages are rather those from a colleague writing in his
own musical
world.
Fanfares was written for the
harpsichordist Joyce Lindorff and dates
from 1994. The first two movements are based on similar
motifs, and
offer clear examples of how Caltabiano will take an idea
and let it
walk, or run, then go back and let it do the same thing
for a longer
time or in another direction. Both these movements start
from bright
and simple things to end with dense chords unexpected
from the
instrument. The finale then makes a loop out of this
trajectory,
moving from dark melody to brilliant figures that are
even more
fanfare-like than those of the earlier movements but have
the same
wonderful tendency to complicate themselves into sonorous
harmonies.
Hexagons, also from 1994, was written
for the New Jersey-based group
called Hexagon, consisting of wind quintet plus piano,
but the work is
hexagonal in other ways too. There are six movements, and
the ideas
seem to spring from dividing the twelve notes into two
six-note
groups. It is typical of Caltabiano, though, that the
resulting
harmonies strongly feature tonal intervals—thirds,
fourths, fifths,
octaves—and that melodies will often be in modes
devised to suit the
human voice. The most obvious example here is the
pentatonic tune on
the oboe in the third movement that has a linked sequence
of different
repercussions.
Hexagons is almost a condensed reworking of Concertini
(compare the
opening movements, which both seem to end too soon,
opening broad
musical spaces to be filled by the movements to come),
and again there
are concertini for the various instruments: bassoon and
piano (I);
flute, clarinet, and horn with piano, the oboe entering
only near the
end and the bassoon never (II); oboe, in a pastorale
(III); horn and
bassoon (IV); and clarinet, accompanied and imitated only
by flute and
oboe (V), the finale being for everyone.
Again, too, the movements are linked motivically, but the
rhythmic
and registral patternings are different. In rhythmic
character the
movements are arranged symmetrically, with endpieces that
are both
strongly pulsed and in the same allegro tempo, more
flexible sections
in second and fifth places, and slow movements in the
middle. In terms
of register, there are two smaller ascending waves, from
the lowest
register to the middle (I-III) and from the middle-low
register to the
highest (IV-VI). As if having moved along the six sides
of a hexagon,
the music returns to where it began, with boogie-woogie
piano,
strident chords, and reiterative semitone motifs. But
time is not like
space. No true return is possible. Things have been
encountered and
learned along the way, and the finale has to accommodate
them while
keeping up the beginning’s hope.
—Paul Griffiths
RONALD CALTABIANO's music has been
hailed as having achieved "...a remarkable synthesis
of modernism andromanticism, of violence and lyricism, of
integrity and accessibility."
He first came to international attention in the early
1980s with his String Quartet No. 1, premiered in Great
Britain by the Arditti Quartet and in the United States
by the Juilliard Quartet. A series of virtuoso solo
pieces (double bass, cello, English horn, trombone, and
violin) solidified his position among the leading
American composers of his generation, and a series of
prominent orchestral commissions soon followed. Works
written for the San Francisco Symphony, the Dallas
Symphony Orchestra, and the Cincinnati Symphony exhibit
kaleidoscopic colors and provocative designs.
Performances by international orchestras include those of
the BBC Symphony, the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, and the
Royal Scottish National Orchestra. The composer's finely
detailed chamber music has also been in demand around the
world. Notable works include Concerto for Six Players,
commissioned by the Fires of London for their farewell
performance; On the Dissonant and Rotations, both
commissioned by Australian ensembles; and prominent
commissions by American organizations, including the
String Quartet No. 2 (Emerson Quartet), Quilt Panels
(Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center), and Clarinet
Quartet (consortium of new-music ensembles). The dramatic
bent in Caltabiano's work naturally lends itself to vocal
music, which has been an important focus throughout the
composer's development, from the early song cycle, First
Dream..., through two dramatic cantatas, Medea and
Torched Liberty, and his first theatrical work, the 1999
chamber opera Marrying the Hangman, on a text by Margaret
Atwood, written for the British ensemble Psappha. Major
awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the
Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation
were anticipated by a number of awards from BMI and ASCAP
as well as two Bearns Prizes. Since working as assistant
to Aaron Copland during the last five years of that
composer's life, Caltabiano has served on the faculties
of the Manhattan School of Music and the Peabody
Conservatory, and currently teaches at San Francisco
State University.
Born in 1959, Caltabiano is a BM/MM/DMA graduate of The
Juilliard School, where he studied with Elliott Carter
and Vincent Persichetti. In addition, he has studied
composition with Peter Maxwell Davies and conducting with
Harold Farberman and Gennadi Rozdesvensky.
|
