WARSHAUER Shacharit Like Streams in the Desert, Ahavah * Kirk Trevor, cond; Stephanie Gregory (sop); Jennifer Hines (mez); Michael Hendrick (ten); Carol Potter (nar); Slovak RSO; Slovak Ph Ch * ALBANY TROY 973 (65:42)
WARSHAUER Shacharit Like Streams in the Desert, Ahavah * Kirk Trevor, cond; Stephanie Gregory (sop); Jennifer Hines (mez); Michael Hendrick (ten); Carol Potter (nar); Slovak RSO; Slovak Ph Ch * ALBANY TROY 973 (65:42)
WARSHAUER Symphony No. 1, “Living Breathing Earth.” Concerto for Shofar and Trombone, “Tekeeyah” * Peter Vronsky, cond; Haim Avitsur (shofar, tbn); Moravian PO * NAVONA 5842 (50:58)
As stated at the outset of the interview, Meira Warshauer has devoted much of her creative output to Jewish themes and their universal message. Not unrelated is the fact that her work also reflects a love and concern for the earth. For the most part, however, her music is not directly derived from traditional Jewish melodies or synagogue cantillation, and when it is, as with some of the source material she drew upon from the Sound Archives collection of the Hebrew University, it is thoroughly absorbed, integrated, and metamorphosed into a musical language that is Warshauer’s own.
The vocabulary and style are mostly late 20th-century postmodern, though sometimes, as in the sound effects achieved in the “Call of the Cicadas” movement from the Symphony No. 1, Warshauer flirts with the avant-garde. But her music is always firmly rooted in readily recognizable formal processes of statement, extension, variation, contrast, development, and restatement. In other words, the music has shape and form, sets up expectations through a variety of tension-building techniques, and ultimately satisfies those expectations by resolving the conflicts.
If I hear any influence in some of the passages for narrator and orchestra in Warshauer’s Shacharit, it would have to be Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony, but the similitude is fleeting. The more lasting impression is of an expansive lyricism filled with an almost ecstatic feeling of compassion. The heavy orchestral arsenal of percussion also contributes materially to the celebratory sense-the clapping of hands and shouting for joy-throughout much of the work.
Like Streams in the Desert can only be described as a nine-minute orchestral tone poem of exquisite delicacy. It begins as a landscape seen at twilight through the gauze of a slightly exotic-sounding, almost Delius-like setting, but it soon transits to an animated, jazz-inflected Gershwinesque/Coplandesque middle section that once again seems to express the same sense of life-affirming joy heard in Shacharit. A return to the opening material comes, as expected, toward the end, but Warshauer surprises us with a joyous coda that recalls the middle episode.
Ahavah for mezzo-soprano, chorus, and orchestra is in three movements, and to some extent harks back to the ecstatic style of Shacharit. Percussion still plays a prominent role in the orchestration, but the music now is more hushed by a sense of spiritual awe. I would just single out Jennifer Hines, who sings the alto part magnificently.
For the computer-inclined, the Living Breathing Earth CD offers additional features of considerable interest. The disc will play normally in a regular CD player, but if it’s inserted into your computer’s CD drive, you can access an interview of Meira Warshauer by Richard Kowal of WCQS Asheville Public Radio, as well as a public radio profile broadcast covering the work’s debut by the Dayton Philharmonic. But perhaps most fun for an avid score reader and fancier of iPads and similar electronic devices is the ability to follow the score of Living Breathing Earth in one of the cleverest PC applications I’ve encountered. Place your mouse pointer at the top right-hand corner of the page and drag it in a downward diagonal motion. As you do, the page literally turns as it would in a book. I’ve never seen this done before in a standard PC app, and it really tickled me. It was almost more fun to turn the pages than to actually try to follow the score, which is for a very large orchestra, making the notation small and difficult to read. You may be able to increase the size by resetting your display screen’s resolution, but I doubt it, since the font point of the score is set to a size that permits the full vertical height of a page of the score, with all of its instrument staves, to be viewed on the page.
As for the music, as noted, the first movement of Warshauer’s symphony, filled with the all-too-realistic sounds of millions of swarming insects, harmless though they may be, makes my flesh crawl. But the second movement, depicting a river scene at night, presents an entirely different soundscape. In it, Warshauer really reveals herself as a romantic at heart. The piece is a beautiful, atmospheric nocturne that at times reminds me of the quieter moments in Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite, and there is one passage in particular that conjures the dreamlike state of rapture at the end of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.
The Concerto for Shofar and Trombone on the Living Breathing Earth CD is certainly novel, though I wouldn’t call it a novelty, for we tend to associate that word with something that has little or no value, a mere bauble. Warshauer’s concerto is anything but a bauble, but indeed, one must ask, “Who would ever have thought of such a thing?!” As you’ve already gleaned, the shofar is capable of sounding basically two pitches, the E above middle C, and the C a sixth above that. Moreover, anyone who has ever tried to blow the thing can tell you that it has a mind of its own and that it cannot be counted on to produce even those two pitches reliably and on demand. The truth is it’s not really a musical instrument; at least that was not its original purpose. Of necessity, Warshauer has written a part for it that is pretty much limited to the punctuating ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta fanfares which, amazingly, Haim Avitsur manages to make sound in tune and in time on every single entrance. In between, he doubles on trombone, a much more manageable instrument for which Warshauer has written quite artfully, and which Avitsur plays masterfully.
Both of these CDs contain music that is very beautiful and deeply moving. I recommend them to listeners of all persuasions. Jerry Dubins
I first encountered Meira Warshauer’s music back in 1994 while reviewing, for Fanfare, a multicomposer release on the MMC label titled Robert Black Conducts. Her contribution was an eight-minute orchestral piece titled Revelation. I found it striking in its orchestration, harmonic structure, rhetorical power, and haunting eloquence. Having revisited it in preparation for this review some 17 years later, I find its profound religiosity more moving than before. Only the truly lasting stuff gains in power through time. My second encounter came three years ago. Again it was via a Fanfare review of another MMC multicomposer offering. It was titled Perspectives, and her piece, Yes!, was a tour de force for clarinet and orchestra. Full of pop and jazz inflections and quotoids (I hope I’ve just coined a word), I found its sheer playfulness infectious and came away admiring the stylistic scope of her apparently ever-expandable musical language. Despite the vastly different aims and consequent demands of each piece, her distinctive voice was always unmistakably clear.
And now, given these two discs of major works by Warshauer, I not only see her more in the round, but can detect a line of progression in her art. The major work on the Albany disc, Shacharit, is her setting of the Sabbath Morning Service. Composed in 1989 as her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Gordon Goodwin and Mario Davidovsky, and with guidance from Jacob Druckman and Samuel Adler, its required forces are large-soprano, tenor, narrator, chorus, and full symphony orchestra with augmented percussion. In 10 sections, it takes 35 minutes in this performance. In it the melismatic contours of cantorial singing are merged with its largely diatonic language and the results are mutually reinforcing. The alternations between English and Hebrew, and the brief moments illuminated by the narrator, raise this piece from the specific to the universal. In my fantasy world, I can only imagine what Ernest Bloch would say upon hearing it.
Like Streams in the Desert, composed in 1998 for the celebration of Israel’s 50th anniversary, is purely orchestral and is inspired by Psalm 126, which sings of “the return of exiles to Zion.” In her striving to make the Jewish experience a universal one, Warshauer metaphorically opens the piece with a plaintive Salonikan Greek melody-a call of a lover for her beloved from afar. From there the music evolves into moments of conflict alternating with those of hope. In structure, it is a theme-and-variations scheme culminating in a moment of troubled joy. The orchestration is simpler and less colorful than that of Shacharit, but the piece is rendered more tellingly thereby.
Ahavah (Love), composed four years earlier, reverts more to the language and forces of Shacharit. It is a grand choral work for mezzo-soprano, chorus, and orchestra that proclaims the profound connection between ourselves and the earth upon which we stand-the source of our existence, nurturing, and, ultimately, demise-connecting us to something far greater than the mere historical evolutions of our earthly empires, past and present, and all their temporally earthly preoccupations.
These performances, conducted by the ubiquitous Kirk Trevor, are typically splendid. In a world where name soloists abound, these folks are far from known. They are, however, technically impeccable by the most stringent of standards, and produce inspired and inspiring performances. Soundwise, the disc is fine.
The Navona disc, titled after the subtitle of Warshauer’s Symphony No. 1 as Living Breathing Earth, shows at once a simplification of, and more complex stage in, Warshauer’s musical evolution. I find it harmonically more direct than the works on the Albany release, but, orchestration-wise, far more variegated and kaleidoscopic. The underlying theme of the symphony-the exquisite delicacy, and vulnerability, of the earth’s life support systems-is metaphorically depicted by the essential act of breathing. Periodic repetitions, both harmonic and rhythmic, abound throughout its four deeply interrelated movements. The first, titled “Call of the Cicadas,” presents the riot of ever-renewing insect life found in the Carolina or Georgia summer; the second, “Tahuayo River at Night,” is a gentle barcarole set in the Peruvian rainforest; the third, “Wings in Flight,” depicts the playful flight of butterflies at water’s edge and the soaring birds above; and the fourth, “Living Breathing Earth,” is slow, measured, and seemingly timeless. It soars majestically, but brings the symphony to an unsettling, indeed questioning, close.
Any competent biologist will attest to the fact that all earthly life support systems are inextricably interdependent and fragile. Yet we are all too ready and willing to destroy life through our ongoing pollution of our earth and its atmosphere, and to destroy our tropical rainforests, one of our primary sources of life-sustaining oxygen, in the interest of our geopolitical supremacy and economic prosperity-an unquenchable, not to mention unsustainable, quest for short-term gain at the long-term cost of life itself. So what, in the end, is of real value?
In her notes to this release, Warshauer ties her ecological message to that of her Jewish heritage. Tekeeyah (in Hebrew, A Call) is a concerto for shofar (alternating with the trombone) and orchestra. Here is, once again, a mix of the timeless and the modern. Each of us has an inborn calling, whether we, from time to time, recognize it or not. It defines us, and provides us with a sense of who and what we are on the infinite space-time continuum. This unprecedented concerto, started by Warshauer in 2008 while she was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, is full of moments of questioning, longing, and exultation. Its orchestration is delicately deft and full of sonic tints, and like her Symphony No. 1, it ends in a harmonically ambivalent way-appropriate for music that, like the universe, has neither beginning nor end.
Haim Avitsur, who plays both the shofar and trombone and who provided technical assistance during the concerto’s gestation, acquits himself admirably on a shofar culled from an African antelope. The Moravian Philharmonic under Petr Vronsky provides heartfelt advocacy. Special kudos are in order for its principal trumpet. The sound is detailed, resonant, and given the demands of the music, fully satisfying. William Zagorski
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-2412009891.html
by Jerry Dubins; William Zagorski
Modern Brewery Age