Brutal Chords Amid the Beauty
by Leonard Lehrman ©2008
David Holzman plays Roger Sessions: Sonatas #1&3; Ralph Shapey: Mutations; Mutations II; 21 Variations. Bridge 9243. Time: 79:31
David Holzman may be the last faculty holdout for serious contemporary classical music at Long Island University, in a department founded and nourished by Stefan Wolpe and his disciples, Ralph Alan Dale, Raoul Pleskow and Howard Rovics, which, despite the valiant efforts of John Meschi, no longer has any such concert music composers of stature on its roster. On Albany, Centaur, and now Bridge, Holzman has recorded numerous works of Wolpe, Pleskow, and a few other living composers (Boros, Cornicello, Davies, Greenbaum, Yttrehus) and now turns to Wolpe’s late colleague Roger Sessions (1896-1985) and disciple Ralph Shapey (1921-2002), recording them at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass.
Sessions was Norton Lecturer at Harvard my sophomore year there (1968-69) and I remember supervising the recording of his lectures, and interviewing him for the radio on, of all days, April 9, 1969, the day University Hall was occupied by anti-war protestors. He had participated in the previous May’s Composers for Peace Concert at Carnegie Hall, and had a written a vivid memorial tribute to President Kennedy, complete with simulated rifle shots and church bells, in the finale of his Third Sonata, recorded here. But when my colleague Philip Kanof asked him to comment on what was happening virtually next door as we spoke, he demurred. We started the interview over again, and he was much happier. For him music was its own expression, the working out of dissonance and lyricism its own justification.
That lyricism can be heard, especially at the B-minor beginning and end of the First Sonata (1930). On the whole, though, this is a very strenuous listen, as Holzman tends to take frenetic percussivity to its limits, emphasizing what he calls “brutal chords flailing about” and “pianistically frightening…grotesque violence.” This treatment well serves the stabbingly fragmented Shapey pieces, best described in the composer’s own markings: “majestic passion/of designs, movements and forces/of peace and quiet/of singing tenderness/of passion and fury/with furious wildness, intensity, brilliance and sound/of majestic passion.” Holzman’s website is aptly titled “battlemuse.com.” But why that cigarette in his mouth on the album cover? May he live long and continue to flourish, notwithstanding, in his battle for the acceptance of the music of our time and the not-so-distant past.
