Classical recording Reviews
There's a question I want to put on the table at the start, because it seems to me the right one to ask of Gary William Friedman's new disc. Friedman has spent six decades writing music across a startling range of idioms—Broadway, film, television, jazz, ballet, opera, liturgy, the concert hall—and the standard line on his concert music, established by the reception of his 2008 disc Colloquy, is that the theater and jazz instincts feed the classical writing rather than dilute it. Robert Schulslaper in these pages described music that "combines accessibility with artistic integrity, lyricism with abstraction". That's the line Friedman has earned over many years. But it's also the kind of formulation a reviewer ought to test rather than reproduce. Is the balance still sustained on Journeys, or has the accessibility tipped over into the declarative? I came to the disc, I should say, with that question quite open. The answer, I think, is unequivocal: the balance absolutely holds.
A brief biographical word. Friedman, Brooklyn born, is best known to musical theater audiences for The Me Nobody Knows (1970): five Tony nominations including Best Musical, source of two pop hits in "Light Sings" (The Fifth Dimension) and "This World" (The Staple Singers). What gets less attention is the pedigree underneath the theater career. Friedman studied composition privately with Hall Overton—Thelonious Monk's collaborator and arranger for the legendary 1959 Town Hall concert—and then for four years with Jan Meyerowitz, the Breslau-bornHolocaust survivor who studied with Zemlinsky in Berlin, fled the Nazis via Rome and Marseille, and made his career in the US. Add electronic music with Vladimir Ussachevsky at the Columbia-Princeton studio and you have not the resume of a Broadway populist but of a serious American pluralist whose dramatic, liturgical, jazz, and concert instincts share a common grammar. The point is worth making because it shapes what one hears.
The Journeys Piano Concerto is the disc's most abstract and the most immediately compelling piece. Three movements, just under twenty-seven minutes, and a virtuosic central role for the piano that is by turns decorative, exploratory, and shimmering against an orchestral fabric of unusual warmth. The slow movement is gorgeous, with woodwind playing from the Antoine Silverman Orchestra that has genuine tenderness. Tanya Gabrielian is the ideal advocate. American-born, she studied at the Royal Academy of Musicin London, then was the only candidate accepted into Juilliard's Artist Diploma the year she applied. She brings power and delicacy to the music, intellectually alive to the score's argument. This is one of the most interesting piano concertos I've heard in some time.
Palimpsest, the two-movement string quartet takes Friedman's title literally. He writes of revisiting "earliercompositional ideas" and bringing them "into fresh focus." What I hear is a quartet that absorbs and develops continuously, lines emerging and dissolving into one another, but always with a particular sonority underneath—call it theater-band warmth, that fingerprint of the orchestrator'sear. It's a fresh and unforced piece, beautifully realized by Charlotte Munn-Wood, Aimée Niemann, Blake Allen, and Dara Hankins.
The Butterfly Cantata—premiered in 2014, set down for the first time here—is the longest work and the one likely to define the disc. Seven movements for soprano, baritone, and a chamber ensemble of strings, single winds, brass, and percussion, setting texts associated with the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The risk Friedman takes here is real: writing Broadway-inflected music against some of the most bleakly tinged witness poetry of the twentieth century. It works. The gap between the pain of the texts and the warmth of Friedman's setting becomes itself a kind of statement, the music refusing to mimic the horror, insisting instead on the human voice that wrote the poems. He's not afraid of humor, either: "TheLittle Mouse," to a poem by the three boys writing as Koleba in Terezín, has a charm that would be unbearable if it weren't earned. "A Cartload ofShoes" is the cantata's most striking inclusion. The text is by Abraham Sutzkever, who survived not Terezín but the Vilna ghetto, and who became one ofthe major Yiddish poets of the twentieth century. The choice quietly expands the cantata's frame from child-poetry of one camp to Jewish witness more broadly, and the movement—built around the image of a cart of shoes still vibrating with the memory of their wearers, including the speaker's own mother's Sabbath shoes—is a tour de force. The excellent singers Skye Stauffer and Neal Benari come together for "The Butterfly," Pavel Friedmann's poem, written at Terezín in June 1942, two and a half years before he was murdered at Auschwitz, and the effect is overwhelming. It’s followed by EvaPicková's "Fear," with its simple direct petition, "We want to work, we must not die, we want to live.” This is quietly devastating in asetting that does almost nothing and therefore everything.
This is varied, profoundly communicative music from a composer of unusual distinction, and a wonderful introduction to Friedman's concert writing for anyone who knows him only from the theater.
Five stars: An album that confirms Friedman as a concert composer of real consequence.
- Dominick Hartley
American composer Gary William Friedman works in many musical fields, including classical, jazz, film, television, ballet, opera, and theater... He also utilizes his versatility to compose contemporary classical music. This latter facet is presented here with three works.
The "Butterfly Cantata", in particular, clearly reflects the musical theater style in its construction. The singers in this piece also employ their voices accordingly. The cantata exemplifies how Friedman combines accessibility with artistic integrity.
The other two compositions offer a different approach. The piano concerto "Journeys", classically organized in three numbered movements, allows soloist Tanya Gabrielian to engage with the music in an impressively physical and also deeply internal way...
The string quartet entitled "Palimpsest", is by far the work that offers the most modern musical language... The four instrumentalists master the piece flawlessly.
- Remy Franck
Gary William Friedman impresses as a composer who has mastered his craft. His strong lyrical impulse is discernable even when he adopts an atonal approach, and his disciplined technique prohibits extraneous note spinning. My feeling is that he conceives an artistic premise and won’t rest until he’s achieved it. There are some traces of jazz and Broadway proficiency in this selection of his serious works—he’s had a successful career in both fields— but they don’t intrude in an obvious way. Instead, they’re heard in a certain suavity in song, an intimate knowledge of how to dramatize a text, and a way with extended chords and subtly shifting harmonies. For example, in Song of Moses his harmonic finesse colors what in other, more conservative hands would be a conventional liturgical setting with ear-opening combinations. Yet the overall effect is stimulating rather than aggressively iconoclastic. Combined with smooth voice leading the harmonic daring imparts a lustrous sheen that precludes formulaic blandness and theatrically highlights the text.
Passages is beautifully played by Ed Matthew, who poignantly characterizes each mood of this involving clarinet concerto, yet artfully blends the numerous episodes into a well-knit whole. He’s smoothly accompanied by the attentive orchestra, which is scored with precise sensitivity. Initially surrounded by atmospheric strings, harp and delicate piano accents, the vaguely “modernist” clarinet part builds toward a tender Romance (my term, not the composer’s) that has a lovely, lyrical waltz at its heart. This floats through the central section, varied skillfully with each recurrence. Reminding us that passages are not always smooth, an energetic hint of Klezmer music—ironically?—interrupts the flow: later, another “big” moment elaborates on the third of three linking cadenzas. Actually, only one of these is even slightly florid in the manner of a traditional cadenza: the others are gentle and not prolonged. Perhaps symbolically, Passages ends as it began, with a return of the opening material.
Although I prefer instrumental to vocal music, I found listening to the first of My Heart’s Friend’s four settings— the famous “Yes” soliloquy from Joyce’s Ulysses—a moving experience. The twining voices mirror Joyce’s innovative fusion of language and amorous feeling, and Sylvie Jensen deftly balances joyous anticipation and recollected bliss. The remaining three songs are equally well performed, but for whatever reason it was the first that made the strongest impression.
Colloquy, for piano and viola, may qualify as an atonal composition, but it avoids the disjunct melodic agonies that often disfigure music of this type. While you probably won’t whistle Colloquy’s themes in the shower, there is a moment in the second movement where one could say “the sun comes out and the clouds disperse.” I was tempted to write ‘gloom” instead of “clouds,” but that might be imposing too heavy a burden on the music. Turbulent climaxes erupt, but the mood is primarily reflective, with the instruments—excepting a prominent viola solo— closely bound throughout the conversation’s peaks and valleys.
Gary William Friedman’s music successfully combines accessibility with artistic integrity, lyricism with abstraction, and abundant heart with refined design. While I will revisit Passages most often, that doesn’t diminish my respect for the other works.
- Robert Schulslaper
"Gary William Friedman's Passages, with Ed Matthew on clarinet, is a romantic and startling piece. The slight hints of klezmer mixed with lush strings above momentary and dense discord is seemingly anachronistic, yet the serialist-like melody lines hold the work together. Atonality flourishes in both movements of Colloquy, for viola and piano. It has a romantic atmosphere similar to Passages and My Heart's friend. Friedman is a composer whose forays into musical theatre and liturgical works bleed into his "contemporary classical". It fails to hinder him and, instead, fleshes out his efforts, most notably in the vocal work My Heart's Friend."
- Kraig Lamper
"Composer Gary William Friedman is a familiar presence in the American music scene, having garnered an OBIE award and TONY nomination with his score for The Me Nobody Knows as well as scoring a number of films. The young, and young-at-heart, will also treasure him for his long association with television’s The Electric Company, as music director. His work in the more serious, so-called “contemporary classical” idiom is less well known. Colloquy, Friedman’s intriguing new CD of orchestral and vocal offerings may go some distance in changing that.
The composer’s background in film and theatre is quite evident in the disc’s opening selection Passages, an 18-minute clarinet concerto originally set in 1993 and revised for this recording, here conducted by Gary Sheldon with the central instrument expressively wielded by Ed Matthew. There is a definite narrative quality to this dissonantly tuneful piece (the opening measures rather recall Humphrey Searle's evocative score for The Haunting, in fact), and an impressive palette of emotional coloring. The title’s etiology is left ambiguous in the liner notes, but what with the utilization of bits of klezmer one might glean that the piece affectively traces a Jewish life trajectory, incorporating as it does all the delightful humor those musical influences suggest into an overall fabric that is by turn vaguely unsettling or somewhat melancholy - and in the work’s concluding passages (pun intended) quite heartrending. It is a fascinating composition, possibly the most enjoyable of the lot here, and brings increased satisfaction with repeated listening.
Song of Moses, an a cappella choral work in two parts (their composition separated by some two decades) shows a similar affective awareness, fielding a developmental arc that progresses from the somber declamation of the initial writing to an exultant titular song, and the creative use of jazz influences boasted by the Amen with which the work resolves. Friedman's writing here is quite beautiful and is dispatched with great musicality by conductor Joshua Rosenblum and the vocal forces involved; one hopes this work finds the continued life in the contemporary choral repertoire it richly deserves.
The liner notes inform us that Colloquy, the sonata for viola and piano for which the CD takes its name is “unabashedly atonal” - an entirely accurate characterization, though one that perhaps minimizes the impact of some real lyricism glimmering throughout the piece. The sonata is deftly rendered by the New York Philharmonic’s Judith Nelson and pianist Judith Lynn Stillman.
The disc concludes with My Heart’s Friend, a setting of four poems for soprano (Silvie Jensen) and baritone (Dominic Inferrera). Originally scored for four-handed piano, the work has been re-imagined for a string orchestra, and is here led by Friedman himself. The singers skillfully achieve a notably mellifluous timbral blend in what is some quite challenging vocal writing and render the text, which traces the poetry of James Joyce, William Blake, Harrison Smith Morris and a concluding setting of a Shoshone love song, quite expressively...
...Any lover of serious contemporary music should be pleased with Friedman's disc; there is much here to delight the ear, and quite a bit to challenge the mind as well."
- Mark Thomas Ketterson