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CD REVIEW
Charles Wuorinen SIX TRIOS (Koch International Classics 3-7617-2)
Charles Wuorinen, who turns 60 this year, has pursued a prolific vision of his art that makes no concessions to populist trends. Yet the music is zesty and has immediate appeal, despite its relentless parade of an individualized 12-tone language.
Wuorinen won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in music for an electronic work — an ironic honor in that his subsequent career has shown him to be a composer of unusually challenging pieces for ‘live’ musicians. A collection of trios from the 1980s is on Koch International Classics under the up-front title Wuorinen Trios (***½). The six pieces are blessedly free of both programmatic agonies and please-take-me-home winsomeness.
Emblematic of the set is Horn Trio (1981), bracingly performed by William Purvis, horn; Benjamin Hudson, violin, and Alan Feinberg, piano, which is witty and irrepressible. No wonder Wuorinen wrote a 1985 follow-up, Horn Trio Continued.
My own favorites here are the intricate, sonorous Trio for Bass Instruments (bass trombone, tuba and contrabass) and the energetic, then world-weary, Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano.
An MRI-like view of 16 months of composing activity in the Wuorinen workshop is available in a Group for Contemporary Music compact disc on Koch International Classics (****).
The variety is astonishing: a two-piano version of a ballet score The Mission of Virgil, a flowing, intense, almost picturesque performance by pianists Richard Moredock and Cameron Grant, and Piano Quintet extends the somewhat grand tradition of writing string quartet plus piano.
Many pieces for percussion ensemble come across like a whimsical workshop tour (let’s hear a bit of this, now a bit of that — oh, that’s interesting!), but Wuorinen integrates the ensemble beautifully in Percussion Quartet, and one senses that the musical concept remains uppermost.
Anyone who thinks that 12-tone music can’t be lyrical, should hear Lightenings viii, a setting of a brief Seamus Heaney poem sung by soprano Elizabeth Henrickson-Farnum, accompanied by James Winn.
Jay Harvey, The Indianapolis Star, 27 September 1998
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