Word: rochberg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...20th century, says Stern, "is one of the richest periods in musical creativity." A discriminating advocate of contemporary violin music who has given premieres of concertos by William Schuman, George Rochberg and Krzysztof Penderecki, Stern has had a privileged view of modern musical history; in June he will premiere a work by Britain's iconoclastic Peter Maxwell Davies in Scotland. The phantasmagorical Dutilleux concerto was commissioned by Radio France in celebration of Stern's 60th birthday almost six years ago ("He had problems about coming to an end," says Stern, explaining the delay) and was first performed in Paris last...
...Rochberg has since refined his neo-tonal style in such works as the String Quartets Nos. 4, 5 and 6, known collectively as the "Concord" Quartets after the ensemble for which they were written, and the Violin Concerto, premiered by Isaac Stern. But his most ambitious rapprochement with the past has come not in instrumental music but in opera. The Confidence Man, with a libretto by Gene Rochberg based on Herman Melville's bleak, cynical novel, is currently on display at the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico...
...Rochberg has done his best to flesh out the unpromising material. The opera, his first, is filled with striking set pieces: a lyrical duet for China (Tenor Neil Rosenshein) and his wife Annabella (Soprano Sunny Joy Langton); an ominous interview between China and his moneyed friend Orchis (Tenor Michael Fiacco), whose threatening nature is underlined by a snap-pizzicato line in the low strings; a good-natured, bibulous ensemble lauding the joys of wine. In his handling of the choruses, Rochberg is especially skillful; indeed the final chorus, extolling the virtue of confidence, recalls the Falstaffian spirit of Verdi...
...composer has also indulged in one inside joke. As China is debating whether to accept Orchis' loan, the Angel of Bright Future appears to him in a dream, encouraging him to take the money in a siren song of harsh modernity that reaches back stylistically to Rochberg's use of atonality in the '50s. Bright Future (musical "modernism") holds out the promise of artistic redemption. But it proves to be an empty, cruel promise, best rejected...
...failure of The Confidence Man does not necessarily mean a corresponding failure of musical idiom. The quality of Rochberg's lyric invention is high, and the fast-moving sequences, such as the minstrel show, are handled with dashing technical assurance. Even the two scenes with the angel, ironic though they are, display a strong command of modern musical materials. Rochberg has issued a challenge in The Confidence Man, to both himself and other composers, a challenge to make modern music speak again in the language it inherited from the 18th and 19th centuries. Whether it can be done persuasively...