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George Perle
Orchestral Works
Seattle Symphony
Gerard Schwarz,
Music Director
Royal Philharmonic
David Epstein,
Conductor
Michael Boriskin
Piano
It is said that the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé used to speak of le vertige de la page blanche the vertigo, if not the sense of bafflement, experienced by a writer's first contemplation of the blank page before him, inviting and paralyzing at the same time. For the composer of music, the as-yet untouched lines of the staff on a still-blank score page must also pose a similarly daunting infinity of possibilities. As with writing, there are so many choices to be made at the outset by any composer, and these choices only gradually cohere as one page follows the other and the work takes form. Of course, things become quickly more manageable once some fundamental decisions have been made, either by intuition or by the force of logic, about the nature of the musical language to be used, and how that language is to be molded into a musical structure that affects the untutored listener even upon the crucial first hearing.
As is amply evident by the music on this recording, George Perle (b. 1915, Bayonne, New Jersey) has found a musical language that is both authentically his own and one that is recognizable as a language which has its antecedents in particular composers of the early part of this century specifically, the music of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky and Bartòk. The gradual process by which he arrived at a way of working that he himself could identify as his own was not easy, and serendipity certainly played a part. In 1937 Perle made his first connection with the revolutionary innovations of "Schoenberg and his School" (to use the term popularized ten years later by René Leibowitz) when he came upon a copy of Alban Berg's Lyric Suite. In its immediate impact on the young Perle it was overwhelming, serving both as an incitement and a confirmation of the potentialities of a disciplined yet still expressive musical language for our time. As anyone who has met George Perle knows, his is not a temperament at all given to any kind of wooly mysticism about the nature of things, but even today it is still possible to marvel at the way Berg's music effected a transmigration into Perle's youthful imagination a message sent through the aether from Vienna to Chicago. The impact has been eloquently described by Perle himself. He recalls that "I took it to the dormitory piano and within the next five minutes my whole future direction as a composer was establishedIt wasn't until I came upon the Lyric Suite that I realized that there was something going on in contemporary music that implied really significant new ways of thinking about harmony, rather than some way of evading the subject"
But well before that, there was an experience with musical sound of equal import. When he was six or seven years old in a Chicago apartment, he first heard an ordered series of notes ending with a properly satisfying cadence. Perle's memory of this occasion is also vivid: "My Russian immigrant father, a house painter, bought a piano in anticipation of the arrival of his niece, a pianist, from the 'old country.' The first piece I can recall hearing and the recollection is very intense is the first of the Chopin 'Trois nouvelles études,' the one in F minor. I must have been able to 'follow' it, at that very first hearing. Otherwise, how could I have been so extraordinarily moved by it, how could it have made such a strong and coherent impression?"
Chopin, then Berg much later, the old and then the new. The breadth of Perle's interest in music past and present is evidenced, as he has said, not only by an "enormous and continuing respect and affection for the traditional harmonic language of Western music," but also by the pathbreaking nature of his theoretical studies. In search of the foundations for his ongoing compositional practice, he broke through many kinds of musical polarizations that have wracked contemporary music, above all in academe, and has given us the definitive two-volume study The Operas of Alban Berg as well as an analysis of the symmetrical formations in the quartets of Béla Bartók; along with the fundamental text Serial Composition and Atonality: an Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, now in its 6th edition, he has evidenced a late interest in the modal systems of Stravinsky, among others. These imposing works, as well as his numerous essays on contemporary music from both a biographical and purely analytical point of view (many now gathered in his recent collection The Right Notes: 23 Selected Essays on 20 th -Century Music), have, over the years, served as underlying accompaniment to the principal direction of George Perle's musical imagination that of composer. Since easy classifications often reduce themselves to the most facile pigeonholing, perhaps it is useful and just to repeat Perle's deepest-held conviction since his student days that he has always been a composer above all else. This has been the primary impulse in his life; the catalogue of his work over the years for orchestra, chamber ensembles, quartets and solo instruments gives the most ample demonstration of this inner drive. Still, because of the quantity and quality of his work in contemporary musicology, it is only natural that he would be also renowned as a theorist vitally concerned with the language of contemporary music, and most specifically, a specialist in the work of Alban Berg. What is not immediately evident is that all this work as critical observer and teacher arose in direct response to his needs and interests as a composer. The creative activity organically led to the other. For some, any kind of such duple activity in the worst of cases, the musicologist possibly suffocating the potential creative impulse turns out to have been just the reverse of what happened with George Perle; his imaginative approach to the music of the recent past was a source of nourishment for his own compositions-in-progress. By the way, the matter of Berg's "influence" on Perle's own compositions should be put to rest. As Richard Goode has noted, "it is worth pointing out how little Perle's music sounds like Berg's," how far the clarity and resilient playfulness of Perle's music is from Berg's "jungle-like luxuriance." These may seem like obvious things to say about a composer and his supposed "influences," but they are nonetheless true for being obvious.
By finding parallels and correspondences here and there in the most varied kind of musical practice, Perle evolved his own language first intuited back in Chicago, when so many other of his contemporaries found themselves incapable of carving out of the expansive twelve-tone space a musical idiom that was identifiable and distinct. Perhaps too many were, unlike the loner/outsider that is Perle, too much under the thrall of certain masters of one persuasion or another.
In any case, here we are at the end of the twentieth century, and in spite of what can be called a factitious "return to tonality" on the part of some currently acclaimed composers, both listeners and composers know that in the realm of aesthetics, no clock has ever been turned back to any ultimate benefit. Revivalism may be a valid phenomenon in other spheres of public life, but the idea of "making it new" has always been the only banner ever valid for artistic innovation in relation to tradition. George Perle is the exemplar of yet another revolution that succeeds the much-vaunted revolution propagated by Arnold Schoenberg and others in the early half of the twentieth century. As an avid and pioneering student of the Viennese avant-garde from that time, Perle is both a witness to this harmonic expansion and an agent for yet another way of thinking about this contemporary harmonic practice in general. He brings forth in a new light a series of musical signposts that had been so precipitously abandoned by the more zealous rigorists of an earlier generation of composers. So, the ideal of musical coherence lies at the heart of his practice, and it is contained in a term which is apparently an oxymoron the musical language which he has called "twelve-tone tonality." His music sounds newly minted, very much of our time, but it brings to the fore a set of precompositional procedures embracing symmetry and the use of "cyclic series" of intervals in movement that parallels in certain respects the practice of musical composition before the twentieth century. As he says, "I have a language that permits progression, and cadences and keys. I can think in a systematic way about music. That is what you can do when you have a language as with Mozart, Brahms, Schubert." The contemporary British composer Oliver Knussen made this point also when he noted that "George Perle is emphatically one of [the] fewwho has spent much of his life looking for answers to the vexed question as to what constitutes the right notes in a post-diatonic age."
If not a peripatetic philosopher, George Perle certainly qualifies as a peripatetic composer; his long career as a teacher has taken him for considerable stints first at the University of Louisville (1949-1957) where he was a participant in the Rockefeller Foundation grant encouraging contemporary composition with the Louisville Symphony under Robert Whitney), then the University of California at Davis (1957-1961) and finally at the City University of New York (1961-1985). Scattered among these major appointments were guest professorships at Yale, Buffalo, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and the University of California at Berkeley, not to mention a stay at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy and his appointment to a MacArthur Fellowship in 1986, the same year in which he won the Pulitzer Prize. One of the most fruitful occasions along the way was the invitation by Herbert Blomstedt and the San Francisco Symphony to become Composer-in-Residence for the years 1989-1991.
The "Sinfonietta II" was commissioned both by the Symphony and its "Meet the Composer" Program, and was given its first performances by the orchestra in February 1991. Similar to the instrumentation of his earlier "Sinfonietta I" of 1988, the size of the orchestra for this work resembles in number of instrumentalists the standard symphony ensemble of Mozart's day, so that both the musical language and the distinctive clarity of a small ensemble would evoke, in terms of greater sprightliness and rhythmic spirit, the order and shape of an eighteenth-century sound impression. As is to be expected, there are Perlian touches to this basic ensemble; among other additions, there are considerable parts for piccolo and bass trombone, and the percussion ensemble vibraphone, glockenspiel, chimes, tam-tam and whip included that give a delightful piquancy and sense of play to the two scherzi which surround the grave and contemplative slow movement, "Chorales and Diversions." And too, like the traditional minuet or scherzo in a classical symphony, each of these
outer movements is in a tripartite ABA design, easily captured by the listener at first hearing. Though the orchestra has been purposefully reduced in size, this "Sinfonietta II" is still something of a mini-concerto for orchestra in that it contains, in its playful gracefulness, considerable virtuoso workouts for bassoon, oboe, trombone, flute and piccolo. Using silences and carefully calculated pauses, this delicately dissonant work is a divertimento of constantly changing colors and dialogue amongst the instruments, contrasting only with the sombre middle movement, a dark chorale announced by the plaintive, muffled sound of the bass trombone playing with a bucket mute (a sound familiar to jazz lovers), interjecting with the strings and winds and harp and finally returning to speak the doleful initial theme once again.
If the "Sinfonietta II" might be considered as the inviting overture to this collection of four works by George Perle, the "Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra" of 1990 must be thought of as a considerable pièce de résistance in itself and a major landmark in Perle's career as a composer. Always reticent about his work in general, he does permit himself considerable satisfaction about this work in particular and the performance by its brilliant advocate on this recording, pianist Michael Boriskin.
The first concerto was another happy result of the collaboration and interplay between composer and orchestra during Perle's composer-in-residency in San Francisco, 1989-1991. The work was commissioned in 1988 in honor of then musical director Herbert Blomstedt through the generosity of Mrs. Paul L. Wattis; it should be considered as a welcome anticipation of the composer's presence in San Francisco, since the first performances of the work actually took place on January 24, 25, 26 1991 when he was already in residence with the orchestra, with Richard Goode as soloist and David Zinman as guest conductor.
Although this work is indeed the first of two major concerti for piano by George Perle (a second quickly followed, dated 1992), he had always looked forward to the opportunity of composing for the piano, whether in the guise of works for solo piano (especially notable among them two books of etudes and the more recent "Phantasyplay" and "Six Celebratory Inventions," both from 1995), or the piano accompanied by a small ensemble, as in the "Concertino for Piano, Winds, and Timpani" (1979) or the "Serenade No. 3 for Piano and Chamber Ensemble" of 1983. The first concerto is in every sense an expansive work, with brilliant writing for the piano soloist and a challenging counterpart of large orchestral forces including an expanded percussion section. The number of instrumentalists offers the greatest degree of aural perspectivism between the at times energetic, at times contemplative solo part and the lithely rhythmic orchestral commentary. Throughout all four movements chamber-like sonorities are heard amidst this rich instrumental panoply. Indeed, Michael Steinberg alleges that "this could be one for The Guinness Book of Records, at least I don't know of another piano concerto with such a large orchestra" (p. 338, The Concerto).
The opening Allegro, as long as the other three succeeding movements combined, starts on its way with a marvelous sense of airy transparency in the music for both soloist and orchestra. There are myriad examples of felicities both in the scampering brilliance of the piano part (often two hands in octaves) along with other surprising touches as the movement proceeds. For instance, after a jocular set of scalar conversations back and forth between piano and orchestra, there is a grand pause, a kind of "change of gears" at bar 130, and the four clarinets suddenly present a sumptuous sonic cushion for the increasingly stark outlines of the soloist; this in turn is quickly followed by a set of zany glissandi, then motoric accompaniment to the evocations and recapitulation of early thematic and rhythmic material, xylophone added this time for a touch of pungency. In Perle formal coherence is of the utmost importance, or, as Steinberg has it, "Everything returns in due course, but nothing returns literally: all is development, variation, invention, play."
After the perky and ebullient Scherzo, the composer gives us an Adagio of uncommon eloquence, beginning with a solo rumination that evokes ever so slightly an abstract late-at-night improvisation with still, lucid commentary by the English horn and clarinets at first, then four clarinets, then woodwinds with strings. Ending as it began with solo piano, the whole movement is a masterpiece of quiet reticence.
The final Allegro is a grand unleashing of all the energies implied and partially expressed in the previous three movements. It is good to hear a contemporary composer challenging both soloist and orchestra with an almost balletic interplay of rhythmic bursts and carefully calculated rests. Ranging between portentous declaration and a fearsome yet still antic piano part, the listener has the sense of the composer at play, happy to lay out his forces in staccato contention, answering each other with plenty of pyrotechnics and shifting accents to make this "dare" in music all the more gripping as soloist and orchestra proceed without a hitch toward the final chord, appropriately insouciant as it is.
The "Adagio for Orchestra" (1993) is intimately related to the profound and lasting impression left by the Adagio from the first piano concerto. Since the connection between the one and the other is so direct, perhaps the composer is the one to best tell the tale. Referring to conductor David Zinman, who directed the first performances of the concerto in San Francisco, Perle recalls that "[Zinman] was particularly struck by the slow movement of the concerto and proposed that the projected new piece (to be commissioned for Mr. Zinman) should also be a slow movement. In February 1992, the Carnegie Hall Corporation commissioned me to write a piece of six to eight minutes in length for Mr. Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra." Like its sister piece, the "Adagio for Orchestra" makes its eloquent points in a movement of quiet luminosity.
The "Three Movements for Orchestra' was given its first performance on June 14, 1963 at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam during the 37th annual festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music. The American premiere followed on March 17, 1965 by the Chicago Symphony under the baton of Jean Martinon. Dedicated to Hugo Weisgall, the "Three Movements" consists of "Prelude," "Contrasts," and "Ostinato." As the composer has remarked, "the principal movement, 'Contrasts,' is framed by two shorter movements that are more homogeneous in structure and style. The first movement is characterized by static harmonic blocks that constantly overlap one another. The second movement is like the large central panel of a triptych in its relation to the outer movements, in that it is more complex and comprises a variety of contrasting sections. The third movement is characterized by a continuous rhythmic impulse which is derived from the conclusion of the preceding movement. The work closes, after a pause of 16 seconds (the same duration as that which separated the first and second movements), with a brief coda reminiscent of the beginning of the second movement." On the matter of the function of these "silences" in this haunting and evocative performance by David Epstein and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, George Perle makes a final pointed remark: "A long pause like the one that precedes the final bars of the 'Three Movements for Orchestra' is abhorred by recording engineers and is likely to be radically truncated when a tape is edited for recording. In the present instance, however, the composer's score has been faithfully followed."
Alexander Coleman
Michael Boriskin
Michael Boriskin, widely hailed as one of the most versatile and imaginative pianists of his generation, has performed throughout the United States and in over thirty countries. A native New Yorker, he made his debut on the Lincoln Center Great Performers Series in 1997, and appears at many of the world's foremost concert venues and with leading international orchestras. He is a prolific recording artist, with a wide-ranging repertoire from Brahms and Tchaikovsky to the present on BMG/Conifer, Harmonia Mundi, New World, Musical Heritage Society, Albany and other labels. For several seasons, his innovative National Public Radio series, Centuryview, was heard regularly on 200 stations across America. He is Artistic Director of The Copland Heritage Association, which oversees the newly-restored Aaron Copland House near New York City, a unique composers' retreat and creative center for American music. George Perle's Piano Concerto No. 2 was written for Mr. Boriskin, who has premiered and recorded many of the composer's works.
David Epstein
David Epstein, Professor of Music at M.I.T. for over three decades, is a conductor, composer and theorist. He has guest conducted major orchestras in the United States, Europe, Israel and Mexico, among them the Royal Philharmonic, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and Vienna Tonkünstlerorchester. He has composed works for orchestra, chorus, and chamber ensembles, and for solo piano, solo violin, and solo viola. His books Beyond Orpheus (1979) and Shaping Time (1995) are concerned wtih the synthesis of musical structure and performance, as is the volume Beauty and the Brain: Biological Aspects of Aesthetics (1988), of which he was an editor.
Gerard Schwarz
Gerard Schwarz has been Music Director of New York's Mostly Mozart Festival from 1982, the Seattle Symphony since 1985, and of the New York Chamber Symphony since 1976. His appearances as a guest conductor have brought him to major orchestras around the United States and he has conducted the Washington Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the Kirov Opera and the Seattle Opera as well. His many recordings with the Seattle Symphony have been devoted to music of American composers and have earned accolades and more than ten Grammy nominations.
Mastered by Wayne Hileman, Squires Productions ·Cover Art: Paul Rhoads · Cover Design: Bates Miyamoto Design
Three Movements for Orchestra p 1975 Composers Recordings, Inc. Licensed courtesy of CRI.
George Perle
Sinfonietta II (1990)
Scherzo I (4:54)
Chorales and Diversions (6:48)
Scherzo II (4:32)
Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra (1990)
Allegro (10:50)
Scherzo (3:16)
Adagio (5:27)
Allegro (6:38)
Michael Boriskin, piano
Adagio for Orchestra (1992) (9:18)
Seattle Symphony
Gerard Schwarz, Music Director
Three Movements for Orchestra (1960)
Prelude (4:36)
Contrasts (8:43)
Ostinato (3:56)
Royal Philharmonic
David Epstein, Music Director
Total Time = 69:03
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