![]() ![]() The first movement almost sounds, like the first movement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, as if it starts in the middle, so vibrant and febrile is its musical material, so charged and syncopated are its rhythms. ![]() The Concierto Festivo, written in 2003 and dedicated to the wonderful guitarist Pepe Romero, is here played by the dedicatee, and a spectacular piece it is. A section in which the percussionist - the excellent Daniel Druckman - sawed away with a bow at a vibraphone made one want to reach for a bottle of aspirin.This highly impressive CD features the music of Puerto Rican composer Ernesto Cordero (b.1946), which strikes me like a ton of bricks. But this was a short work that was still too long for its ideas. It opened impressively with a tolling motif played on marimba and piano and with an ardent melody played - by Eric Bartlett - on the cello. Steiger's trio for cello, piano and percussion was more ambitious. ![]() But several of the other sections were less interesting and the work added up to as little as the actual, trifling, meaning of its title. The fourth number, "The Crazy Girl with Flaxen Hair," could have been called "The Revenge of Maurice Ravel upon Claude Debussy." Kurtag takes one of Debussy's most popular preludes for piano and subjected its delicate sentimentality to ludicrous exaggeration that made it resemble the music of Claude Bolling. The Kurtag, which was performed by flutist Jayne Rosenfeld, bassist Michael Willens and pianist Aleck Karis, consists of six short movements with poetic titles. Gyorgy Kurtag's Six Bagatelles, opus 14/d (1981) and Rand Steiger's "Trio in Memoriam" (1989) were much less impressive. This work was no collection of sound effects, but a dramatic and witty contrapuntal argument. The composer contrasted the violin's highly ordered style with the tape's indeterminate pitches. Actually, the violin music that the Argentine-born Davidovsky seemed to have in mind was the music of J. ![]()
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