Word: riverrun
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...death diminishes the musical scene, but Stephen Albert's fatal automobile accident two years ago was especially costly. At 51, Albert had emerged as one of the leaders of the neo-conservative traditionalist movement, a position cemented by his winning the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for his first symphony, RiverRun, a work that was by turns lyrical, witty and sardonic. So it was a bittersweet occasion last week when the New York Philharmonic premiered Albert's Symphony No. 2: the music was first rate, and that made the loss of its composer seem all the more dear...
Commissioned by the Philharmonic, the symphony was completed in "short- score" forma piano score, with some instrumental indicationsin the fall of 1992, two months before Albert's death. Composer Sebastian Currier deciphered the manuscript and added missing dynamics. A smaller, more compact work than RiverRun, the three-movement, 20-minute symphony, as conducted by Hugh Wolff, attests to Albert's command of the post-Romantic idiom. A soaring arch, it consists of two slow movements framing a biting central scherzo, and it is full of Albert's trademark evocations of musical forebears. It opens, for example, with a motive...
Coincidentally, two pieces inspired by Joyce's last novel, Finnegans Wake, were premiered a week apart and had practically the same name. Toru Takemitsu's rippling Riverrun (1984) was given its first performance by Pianist Peter Serkin and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Conductor Simon Rattle. Stephen Albert's ambitious RiverRun debuted at the Kennedy Center in Washington, under Conductor Mstislav Rostropovich with the National Symphony. In Manhattan, Violinist Gidon Kremer played the U.S. premiere of Soviet Composer Sofia Gubaidulina's knotty Offertorium with the New York Philharmonic, while across the East River, the Brooklyn Philharmonic presented the first indoor...
...five, Albert's 40-minute, four-movement symphony was the best, as much for what it represented as for its considerable technical accomplishment. A frank invocation of the spirits of Mahler, Stravinsky and Sibelius in its late romantic thematic materials, its grandiose orchestration and its heroic reach, RiverRun would probably have been laughed off the stage 20 years ago by Albert's colleagues as impossibly regressive. If anything, the grand-gestured RiverRun is not enough of a throwback, bashfully pulling back at crucial moments as though Albert, 43, did not fully trust his expansive instincts. The conservative spirit is scarcely...
...Motherwell's color is never descriptive. Even the more recent arrivals on his palette, like the soft greens and grayed browns of "Irish" paintings like Riverrun, 1972, an homage to Joyce's meditations on Dublin's river, the Liffey, soon acquire this fixed quality. Color in Motherwell is not an adjective, but a noun...