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| | | | | | Selected Works - Heskel Brisman | | | Our Price: $9.95  | | | | Item Number: MMC2160 | | Audio Format: CD | | | | Description | | It is almost impossible to listen to the music of Heskel Brisman without recognizing its strong narrative qualities in which moments of dramatic tension are followed by passages of comic relief. This music, as with that of his most notable teacher, Luigi Dallapiccola, is said to be not only romantic (both composers had a wonderful ear for cantabile melodies), but also tonal — even when, upon closer inspection, it clearly isn't.
Listening to his three movement Sinfonia Breve, one is immediately drawn to the spare but dramatic orchestration of emotional outbursts and comic gestures that bubble up and dissolve as quickly. After a brief introduction, the first movement opens with a melody in the strings that forms the basis of the rest of the piece. From it, fragments and mutations move through the various instruments of the orchestra, unspooling through a variety of episodes without ever losing the movement's narrative drive or sense of youthful optimism.
In Profiles Brisman's folksy humor comes to full flower. Originally written as a set of piano pieces, which he played at home to entertain his children, they were orchestrated much later, in 1987. The five portraits are not, as one might guess, musical portraits of famous personalities, but rather character sketches of animals. The writing throughout is similarly immediate, expressive and droll.
By contrast, Brisman's Andante Sostenuto is more elegiac in tone. This piece too existed in an earlier form as a movement from his first string quartet. In this 1983 version, it has been re-scored for a complete compliment of strings, lifted out of its more intimate environment, and honored with a citation by the New Jersey General Assembly. It is even more ambiguously atonal than the Sinfonia Breve, while retaining a similar, if more abstract, episodic narrative sense. This is Brisman at his most urbane. Yet, even here, one hears his effervescent humor and innate grasp of musical drama.
(Igor Korneitchouk and Ray Cole) |
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