It's always intriguing and heartening to hear Braxton's compositions taken up by musicians outside of himself and his immediate companions. His repertoire is vast and his ideas should provide a great deal of fertile ground. But there's also the issue of the "type" of approach and, all too often in this listener's experience, Braxton's conceptions are filtered through an overly academic strainer that removes the essential (if subtle) roughness and juice from his work. Granted, Braxton himself often seemed to go out of his way to lean toward that branch of interpretation as well so where the fault, if any, lies is certainly debatable.
The ten-piece Ensemble, Montaigne consisting of five strings and five woodwinds, is conducted by Roland Dahinden who, in addition to having worked a good deal with Braxton, has done many performances and recordings of Alvin Lucier's music, another composer who lends himself on occasion to overly dry interpretations. True to the nature of Braxton's conception in recent decades, they string together several of his compositions (numbers 174, 96, 136, 94, 193 as well as some "language music") presented in one 50-minute block, though I'm curious to know how this manifested, i.e., whether those choices were at the behest of the conductor or up to individual instrumentalists; I suspect the former. It's probably inappropriate to complain about the kind of language employed by the musicians here, the vernacular of the post-serial (non-Cage version) "classical" world since that seems to have been the vector of Braxton's desires in this area, but a big part of me can't help but think how much richer it might be if tackled by either instrumentalists with at least some footing in both jazz and new music circles (George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell, etc.) or European musicians beyond academe, well into post-Cage territories (those associated with the Wandelweiser collective, Christian Wolff, Jakob Ullmann, etc.)
These caveats aside and taken the work on its own terms, it's certainly an extremely well realized performance, solid and precise. The instrumental colors are wide-ranging and the pacing (or implied pulse) is varied throughout, leaving no real dead spots, something I'm guessing can be credited to Dahinden, who I also assume is steering the transitions and to an extent perhaps the improvisations. This keeps things sharply focused, though arguably at the expense at the sort of wonderful, spontaneous shifts and explosions that took place in the 80s Braxton quartet with Crispell, Dresser and Hemingway where this strategy was first employed. Interestingly, some of the sections which work the best are those that have a kind of Pendereckian, darkly romantic aspect, perhaps more "conservative" in a way, but also much richer and more effective.
In sum, I think it's fair to say that listeners who have enjoyed the myriad previous recordings and performances of Compositions 96 and 134 will enjoy this one, maybe even find it to be the finest of that group. Those who have found that facet of Braxton's oeuvre to be problematic will likely not have their opinions changed here.
Comments and Feedback:
|
