Cover Picture
References
- Composer Recordings Inc., CRI SD 441 (Only on LP format).
Credits
- The Da Capo Chamber Players are:
- Patricia Spencer, flutist.
- Laura Flax, clarinetist.
- Joel Lester, violinist.
- André Emelianoff, cellist.
- Joan Tower, pianist.
- "Modern Love Waltz" composed by Philip Glass.
- Published by Dunvagen Music Publishers, Inc. (ASCAP) arr. Moran (BMI).
- All recorded by David Hancock, New York, February and March 1981.
- Produced by Carter Harman and Carolyn Sachs.
- This is a composer-supervised recording.
- © 1981 Composers Recordings, Inc.
Tracks
- Side One
- Joseph Schwantner "Wind, willow, whisper..." (6:20).
- Shulamit Ran "Private game" (3:58).
- Joan Tower "Petroushskates" (5:32).
- Side Two
- Charles Wuorinen "Joan's" (6:27).
- George Perle "Scherzo" (4:05).
- Philip Glass (arr. Robert Moran) "Modern Love Waltz" (4:05).
Total Time 30:27.
Notes
The DA CAPO CHAMBER PLAYERS, well-known for their extensive performances of twentieth-century chamber music, were Naumburg Award winners for chamber music in 1973, and are one of only two groups to be supported in a second concert (their 10th Anniversary Concert) by this prestigious organization. They perform a series each year at Carnegie Recital Hall sponsored by the Carnegie Hall Corporation, and have toured widely, emphasizing workshops and seminars as well as performances.
The pieces on this record were commissioned by the New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, and the Fromm Foundation.
To build a concert around six commissioned works as the Da Capo Chamber Players did for their 10th Anniversary Concert on March 23, 1980, at Alice Tully Hall, is a risky business. But as this record shows, the six pieces are unusually strong, and, in spite of their diversity, well-matched. As a guideline, the composers were asked to try to work "da capo" into their music. ("Da capo" is a musical term directing the performer to repeat a phrase or to return to the beginning of the piece.)
PHILIP GLASS (b. 1937, Baltimore, Maryland) has performed his music with his own ensemble throughout the United States, Canada and Europe; he became widely known for his operas, Einstein on the Beach (written in collaboration with Robert Wilson) and Satyagraha, premiered in Rotterdam by the Netherlands Opera Company. ROBERT MORAN (b. 1937, Denver, Colorado) has been resident composer with Northwestern University and with the City of West Berlin; his works include a large-scale composition for 100,000 residents of San Francisco, and another for the entire population of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
PHILIP GLASS didn't have time to write anything new and suggested that the group consider playing the solo waltz he had written for Robert Helps' and Robert Moran's "waltz project," in Moran's arrangement for Da Capo's instrumentation (with the piano replaced by an electric piano). The members of the group agreed, and as a result, were able both to end their concert with a frothy divertissement (a kind of built-in encore), and to include an important contemporary idiom they had never worked with before. MODERN LOVE WALTZ is minimalist light music, improbable as that may sound: as in Glass' recent ballet score, Dance, the repetition of simple elements seems not meditative (the traditional description of minimal music), but exhilarating. The harmony oscillates between two dominant-seventh chords a haft-step apart, a flamenco-like effect so rich in unrealized tonal implications that the piece, light-hearted as it is, seems ready to burst with suppressed excitement. (It takes both its inspiration and its title from Modern Love, a novel by Constance De Jong. Glass' collaborator on his opera about the life of Gandhi, Satyagraha.)
Notes by Gregory Sandow
This recording employed hand-made ribbon microphones in pairs, spaced six feet apart, in the best available acoustical environment. Their output was fed to a 30 IPS Studer A-80 tape recorder, slightly modified for constant velocity record-playback characteristics. In this way the need for conventional (and troublesome) noise reduction devices was eliminated. Lacquer masters were cut from the original tapes, employing an Ortofon transducer system with motional feedback. To minimize groove echo, the lacquer masters were processed within twelve hours using the latest European equipment and techniques. Strict quality control pressings were made of the purest available vinyl.
Pictures
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