Roger Reynolds: Violin Works
BMOP/sound

BMOP (Boston Modern Orchestra Project) and its founder, conductor, and Artistic Director Gil Rose have an uncanny knack for bringing work by underexposed composers into the spotlight, its latest, Violin Works, no exception. As one listens to the three concerto performances on the eighty-three-minute recording, it's hard to know who benefits more, the composer, Pulitzer Prize winner Roger Reynolds (b. 1934), or the violin soloist, Gabriela Díaz. Let's call it a draw as the creative gifts of each benefit the other. Their history actually predates the 2013-18 recording of the album material when Reynolds worked with the long-time BMOP violinist as a visiting professor at Harvard in 2012. Without question, Díaz's playing elevates his pieces when it's suffused with musicality, warmth, and humanity, and she's as intrepid a pursuer of new ideas as him. In addition to being a BMOP member, she appears with other forward-thinking outfits such as International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, and A Far Cry. In her hands, Reynolds states, “Everything sings.”

He acquired degrees at the University of Michigan in both engineering physics and, later, composition, and certainly a sense of careful planning and structural soundness is evident in his writing. Yet while there is a clear concern for architectural form in play, his material isn't lacking for imaginative expression. There's openness to new developments too, as witnessed by the album's Personae (1989-90) and its scoring for violin soloist, instrumental ensemble, and computer tape. An early piece by Reynolds, The Emperor of Ice Cream (1961), does something similar in using graphic notation to show performer location on stage. It makes sense that someone so receptive to new ideas would have enjoyed residencies at IRCAM and EMS in Paris and Stockholm, respectively. It's telling too that Reynolds sustained long friendships with Cage, Nancarrow, Takemitsu, and Xenakis, iconoclasts all.

Reynolds' conception of composition as “a process of illumination” is borne out by the three works on the release. For Personae, structured in four parts but presented in a continuous twenty-six-minute form, the violinist assumes four archetypal roles. By having each character in turn provoke responses from the orchestra and computer sound files (though the latter are pre-recorded), Reynolds fashions a bold electroacoustic take on the traditional violin concerto. Díaz initiates the journey unaccompanied in “The Conjurer,” her playing marked by authority and anticipating the entrance of her orchestral partners; the animated second part, “The Dancer,” likewise follows her solo introduction with a swarm of orchestral and electronic sounds. Though, as mentioned, Personae is in four sections, the towering length of the fifteen-minute third, “The Meditator,” lends the work a powerful narrative arc, especially when the brief fourth, “The Advocate,” plays like a satisfying resolution. It's Díaz's expert, pitch-perfect essaying of the upper-register parts in “The Meditator” that are the most memorable aspect of the performance, however.

Between the two ensemble settings is the Zen-inspired Kokoro (1991-92), its twelve parts performed by the violinist alone. The piece, which originated as an Irvine Arditti commission, has the violinist perform twelve contrasting explorations based on a pre-existing theme, in this case a solo Reynolds lifted from an earlier string quartet, Visions. According to the composer, “an ideal performance would involve the assumption of an entirely new psychological stance for each of the parts.” “Unearthly” is suitably ethereal, “Intricate Alternation” intense, and “Augmented Throbbing” a keening swirl. Though many are pitched at a fragile hush, the differences between some parts are dramatic, so much so it's easy to forget they grew from the same seed, and a mere scan of titles such as “A Traversal of Sighs” and “Luminous Murmurs” hints at the differences in mood and tone.

Scored for chamber ensemble and in six movements, Reynolds' wholly acoustic second violin concerto, Aspiration (2004-05), was designed to honour a promise made to Arditti, specifically to create a concerto that would solve a problem he experienced during his tenure with the London Symphony Orchestra: that the players would regularly have to adjust their dynamic levels in order for a guest soloist to be heard. Whereas the typical concerto has the orchestra adopt a supporting role, Aspiration treats them as equally essential. Also factoring into the half-hour work's character is the idea of the soloist “striving for freedom and agency,” hence the title. One is able to observe this struggle play out as the sequence of six ensemble sections and five solo cadenzas appears and in the way they're integrated. Adding to the complexity of the design, the chamber ensemble is divided into high (flute, clarinet, trumpet, two violins) and low (bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, trombone, viola, cello, double bass) “strata,” with percussion and piano playing an “articulative” role. The result is surprisingly orderly—a reflection of the composer's engineering sensibility at work, perhaps. Díaz excels in the solo cadenzas, the gripping ones in the opening and third movements, to cite two instances, graceful and assured in their flight.

July 2022