Eric Nathan: the space of a door
BMOP/sound

Eric Nathan (b. 1983) must have been elated when he learned that Gil Rose and his Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) had decided to record the Providence-based composer's works. After all, who wouldn't be thrilled by the prospect of an award-winning ensemble dedicated to the championing of contemporary classical music performing one's material. Further to that, many a classical release is a sampler featuring single works by a handful of composers; Rose and BMOP, on the other hand, have devoted the entire release to Nathan, which enables the listener to form a solid impression of the composer's style.

Currently a professor with the Brown University Department of Music, this 2013 Rome Prize Fellow and 2014 Guggenheim Fellow has accomplished much in his thirty-seven years. His material has been performed by a multitude of orchestras, ensembles, and soloists, and commissions are likewise plentiful, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, New England Philharmonic, and New York Philharmonic among those who've had works written for them. This BMOP release arrives five years after Albany Records issued Multitude, Solitude: Eric Nathan featuring solo and chamber pieces.

The seven pieces (counting both treatments of Paestum) span the years 2008 to 2016 and thus present a portrait that's anything but static. Yet even with developmental change accounted for, certain elements are foundational to his compositional approach: motives, intervals, textures, and harmony manipulated with a work's over-arching logic in mind; meticulous attention to detail; and an openness to extra-musical associations and inspirations. From the focused integration of all such elements, a coherent picture emerges, the result reflecting a creator receptive to spontaneity but respectful of craft. Words such as celebratory, expressive, vigorous, and imaginative come to mind as the pieces appear.

Bookending the album are two versions of Paestum, the first for orchestra and the other sinfonietta. Regardless of the forces in play, the material suggests in its monumental force the awe Nathan experienced when he first viewed the pillars of the temples of Hera and Athena. As the piece demonstrates with its declamatory opening, there's nothing tentative about Nathan's writing. A gradual shift in dynamics brings with it an attendant re-focusing on texture, with the composer maximizing the evocative potential of the orchestral resources. Complex interlacing of patterns by different sections creates a vivid tapestry of ever-mutating sound until the music swells agitatedly. At album's end, the sinfonietta treatment is understandably less physically powerful, but its scaled-down arrangement also allows for more clarity in the presentation and separation between the instruments.

Presented in a string orchestra version and based on Gesualdo's madrigal “Ahi, disperata vita” (“Ah, desperate life”) from his Madrigali a cinque voci Libro terzo (1594), Omaggio a Gesualdo opens with a subtle yet nevertheless disarming dissonance in its chords before a solo cellist provides a lyrical counterpart to fluttering strings and ghostly harmonics. Even without having the poem at hand, one can hear how Nathan's writing models itself closely to the gestures of the original text (in English: “Ah, desperate life, / Which, whilst fleeing from my loved one, / fallst miserably into a thousand torments! / Oh, turn to your sweet and gracious light which wants to give you comfort”).

For 2008's Icarus Dreamt, the composer drew upon the well-known myth about the titular figure, whose flight too close to the sun caused his wings to fail, but also two artworks, one a kinetic sculpture by Arthur Ganson called Machine with 23 Scraps of Paper and the other the Matisse collage Icarus. Nathan convincingly echoes the movements associated with the source materials in the restless energy of the music, the low and high pitches and ascending and descending patterns likewise suggestive of Icarus's movements. For 2016's the space of a door, Nathan looked for inspiration to the Providence Athenaeum, the book-filled interior of which is shown on the inner sleeve of the release. Musical allusions to Brahms are present, such as a chord at the beginning that references his second symphony, and in his liner notes Robert Kirzinger makes the also-convincing assertion that the chord evokes Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, specifically the C major chord heard during the opening of the fifth door in the opera. Quotations aside, Nathan's holds up perfectly well as a ten-minute evocation of the architectural setting. The contrasts in mood and dynamics and alternations between contemplation and excitement could be seen as symbolizing the inner responses a first-time visitor to the place might have.

August 2020