Composer Arthur Levering releases OceanRiverLake, a collection of his music for chamber orchestra, string quartet, solo piano, and mixed trio that reflects his affinity with the core repertoire of the modern era, Celtic music, and the work of an esteemed colleague who recently passed, Steven Stucky. The album features performances by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Lydian String Quartet, pianist Donald Berman, flutist Sarah Brady, and guitarist Maarten Stragier.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 59:06 | |||
OceanRiverLake |
||||
| Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose, conductor | ||||
| 01 | I. Il Mare Dentro (the sea within) | I. Il Mare Dentro (the sea within) | 9:15 | |
| 02 | II. Flumen (river) | II. Flumen (river) | 10:01 | |
| 03 | III. Summer Morning by a Lake | III. Summer Morning by a Lake | 5:47 | |
| 04 | Giocattolo | Giocattolo | Sarah Brady, piccolo, Maarten Stragier, guitar, Donald Berman, celeste | 9:07 |
Squeezebox |
||||
| Lydian String Quartet | ||||
| 05 | I. The Walls of Liscarroll | I. The Walls of Liscarroll | 0:33 | |
| 06 | II. She Moved Through the Fair | II. She Moved Through the Fair | 2:40 | |
| 07 | III. The Ewe’s Reel | III. The Ewe’s Reel | 2:33 | |
| 08 | Garland for Steven Stucky (2020) | Garland for Steven Stucky (2020) | Donald Berman, piano | 19:09 |
Garland for Steven Stucky (2020)
List of Variations:
Theme (compound melody) (0:40)
Var. I (1:17)
Var. II (0:43)
Var. III Musical cryptogram on the name: STUCKY, S. (1:03)
Var. IV (0:25)
Var. V (0:24)
Var. VI Bells (2:12)
Var. VII (0:28)
Var. VIII (0:22)
Var. IX (1:17)
Var. X (0:45)
Var. XI (1:25)
Var. XII (1:12)
Var. XIII (1:08)
Var. XIV Addition and Subtraction (1:03)
Var. XV (0:31)
Var. XVI (0:47)
Var. XVII (0:37)
Var. XVIII (0:32)
Var. XIX (1:22)
Var. XX Coda (0:57)
Arthur Levering’s music is rich with detail and compositional nuance, presented with utmost clarity at every turn. In the four works for varied instrumentations on this recording, performed by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, flutist Sarah Brady, guitarist Maarten Stragier, pianist Donald Berman, and the Lydian String Quartet, Levering demonstrates an openness to a broad palette of inspirations, and a focused approach to developing material. Each piece is a testament to the power of the fusion between creative intention and disciplined adherence to unfolding craft.
OceanRiverLake pays homage to three iconic depictions of the water in music: Debussy’s La mer, Ives’ Housatonic at Stockbridge from Three Places in New England, and the third movement of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, which is subtitled “Summer Morning by a Lake.” Levering’s opening movement, “Il Mare Dentro,” creates a watery texture by establishing fluid layers of counterpoint that flow through fields of shifting harmonic color. Within the orchestration, one hears sounds evoking fog horns, gulls crying, and crashing waves, before a closing quote from the second movement of La mer. Levering conjures Ives with the dense, murky texture at the opening of “Flumen.” Crescendos emerge first in the brass and later in the strings that swell and accumulate suggesting an intensified current. In “Summer Morning by a Lake,” Levering draws on the klangfarben technique, prominent in movement three of Schoenberg’s op. 16, as well as the chord that serves as its foundation. Despite the peaceful connotation of the title, Levering’s final movement is vigorous and dramatic, as walls of harmony are built and their component sonic bricks are arranged and rearranged in real time to give linear life to this striking verticality.
Read MoreGiocattolo (translated as “toy” in Italian) is scored for piccolo, guitar, and celeste, unfolding in modular phrases that are constantly reordered. Different sections of the work are delineated by motivic roles that individual instruments assume – descending arpeggiations supporting a long sustained line, or virtuosic bursts are interrupted by punctuated irregular accents. Levering patiently varies the phrase syntax, propelling the musical ideas forward as they build rhetorical power. A reflective guitar solo near the work’s midpoint introduces a lyrical, reflective strain while a more vigorous arpeggiated passage ushers in the work’s energetic climax.
Squeezebox for string quartet is inspired by Celtic music, and contains three miniature settings of original folkloric themes, blurred so that the conventional edges of their harmonic rhythm are obscured. The result is a kind of cubist snapshot of the sonic object of Celtic music; all of its component parts are present but they overlap each other in a cathartic swirl.
Garland for Stephen Stucky is a twenty one movement solo piano work in memory of the recently deceased American composer who made such a positive impact on so many in the contemporary music world. At the work’s core is Levering’s affinity for compound melody (otherwise known as implied counterpoint), or writing melodic material that suggests two or more voices within a single line. The work unfolds by exploring extensive permutations of the original compound melodic theme, and as such, links itself with so many great works in the historical canon that applied similarly exhaustive restrictions as a path towards creativity (and ultimately, freedom). While some of the variations are more transparent iterations of the thematic material, others venture further afield. Overall, Levering displays inexhaustible ingenuity in the manifold ways he develops material.
– Dan Lippel
Technical credits:
OceanRiverLake:
Il Mare Dentro recorded September 22, 2008 at Mechanics Hall, Worcester, MA
Flumen and Summer Morning by a Lake recorded September 11, 2019 at Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Recording engineer: Joel Gordon
Giocattolo recorded June 17, 2014 at Distler Hall, Granoff Music Center, Tufts University, Medford, MA
Recording engineer: Jesse Lewis
Squeezebox recorded (live concert) May 10, 2018 at Distler Hall, Granoff Music Center, Tufts University, Medford, MA
Recording engineer: Peter Atkinson
Garland for Steven Stucky recorded October 31, 2022 at the Abeshouse Studio, Pelham, NY
Recording engineer: Adam Abeshouse
Producer: Arthur Levering
Mastering: Joel Gordon
Cover image: Lucía Garó (Unsplash.com)
Design, layout & typography: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com
Composer Arthur Levering has received many awards for his work including the Rome Prize, the Heckscher Foundation Composition Prize, the Lee Ettelson Composer’s Award, commissions from the Fromm Foundation and the Barlow Endowment, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. He has been commissioned by various ensembles including the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Boston Musica Viva, the New Juilliard Ensemble, the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, Sequitur, Musica d’Oggi (Italy), and the Rascher Saxophone Quartet (Germany). His music has also been performed by such prominent groups as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the League of Composers/ISCM, Voices of Change, NewEar, and Lontano, among others, and has been featured at concerts and festivals in Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. Compact discs of his work include School of Velocity, CRI CD 812 (“the best debut album by an American composer I’ve heard this year”—Robert Carl, Fanfare, July/August, 1999), Still Raining, Still Dreaming, New World CD NW 80662, and Parallel Universe, New World CD NW 80750.
The Boston Modern Orchestra Project is the premier orchestra in the United States dedicated exclusively to commissioning, performing, and recording music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Described by The New York Times as “one of the most artistically valuable” orchestras in the country, BMOP is a unique institution in today’s musical world, disseminating exceptional orchestral music “new or so woefully neglected that it might as well be” via performances and recordings of the highest caliber.
Founded by Artistic Director Gil Rose in 1996, BMOP has championed composers whose careers span over a century. Each season, Rose brings BMOP’s award-winning orchestra, renowned soloists, and influential composers to the stage of New England Conservatory’s historic Jordan Hall, with programming that is “a safe haven for, and champion of, virtually every ism, and every genre- and era-mixing hybrid that composers’ imaginations have wrought” (Wall Street Journal). The musicians of BMOP are consistently lauded for the energy, imagination, and passion with which they infuse the music of the present era.
BMOP’s distinguished and adventurous track record includes premieres and recordings of monumental and provocative new works such as John Harbison’s ballet Ulysses, Charles Wuorinen’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Lei Liang’s A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams. The composers performed and commissioned by BMOP contain Pulitzer and Rome Prize winners, Grawemeyer Award recipients, and MacArthur grant fellows.
From 1997 to 2013 the orchestra won thirteen ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming. BMOP has been featured at festivals including Opera Unlimited, the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music with the ICA/Boston, Tanglewood, the Boston Cyberarts Festival, Concerts at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), the Festival of New American Music (Sacramento, CA), Music on the Edge (Pittsburgh, PA), and the MATA Festival in New York. During its 20th anniversary season, BMOP was named Musical America’s 2016 Ensemble of the Year, the first symphony orchestra in the organization’s history to receive this distinction.
BMOP has actively pursued a role in music education through composer residencies, collaborations with colleges, and an ongoing relationship with the New England Conserva- tory, where it is Affiliate Orchestra for New Music. The musicians of BMOP are equally at home in Symphony Hall, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, and in Cambridge’s Club Oberon and Boston’s Club Café, where they pursued a popular, composer-led Club Concert series from 2004 to 2012.
BMOP/sound, BMOP’s independent record label, was created in 2008 to provide a platform for BMOP’s extensive archive of music, as well as to provide widespread, top-quality, permanent access to both classics of the 20th century and the music of today’s most innovative composers. BMOP/sound has released over 90 CDs on the label, bringing BMOP’s discography to over 100 titles. BMOP/sound has garnered praise from the national and international press; it is the recipient of a 2020 GRAMMY® Award for Tobias Picker: Fantastic Mr. Fox, eight GRAMMY® Award nominations, and its releases have appeared on the year-end “Best of” lists of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Time Out New York, American Record Guide, Downbeat Magazine, WBUR, NewMusicBox, and others.
BMOP expands the horizon of a typical “night at the symphony.” Admired, praised, and sought after by artists, presenters, critics, and audiophiles, BMOP and BMOP/sound are uniquely positioned to redefine the new music concert and recording experience.
Gil Rose is a conductor helping to shape the future of classical music. His dynamic performances and many recordings have garnered international critical praise. In 1996, Mr. Rose founded the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), whose unique programming and distinguished performances have earned the orchestra fourteen ASCAP awards for adventurous programming as well as the John S. Edwards Award for Strongest Commitment to New American Music. Also one of the country’s most inventive and versatile opera conductors, Mr. Rose founded Odyssey Opera, a new company dedicated to exploring eclectic and overlooked operatic repertoire, in 2013. He led Opera Boston as its Music Director starting in 2003, and in 2010 was appointed the company's first Artistic Director. Mr. Rose serves as the executive producer of the BMOP/sound label, and has led the longstanding Monadnock Music Festival in historic Peterborough, NH, since 2012.
Flutist Sarah Brady, hailed as “intensely expressive” (New Music Box) and “colorfully agile” (The Arts Fuse), is principal flute with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and frequently performs with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Boston Pops, Boston Ballet, Boston Lyric Opera and Odyssey Opera. A core member of the Radius Ensemble and Collage New Music, she has collaborated with the Talea Ensemble, The Cortona Collective, Sound Icon, Boston Musica Viva, the Firebird Ensemble and the Silk Road Ensemble. After earning an undergraduate degree as a full scholarship student at the University of Connecticut, Sarah received her graduate degrees from the Longy School of Music under the tutelage of Robert Willoughby. Prizewinner in the Pappoutsakis Flute Competition and the National Flute Association’s Young Artist Competition, Sarah is currently the Commissions Coordinator for the National Flute Association. Her solo, chamber and over 80 orchestral recordings including a 2019 GRAMMY award winning opera recording, can be heard on BMOP/Sound, Albany, New Focus, Naxos, Oxingale, Cantaloupe and Navona Records labels. Associate Professor of Flute at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Sarah also runs the Contemporary Classical Performance Program (CCMP).
Maarten Stragier plays guitar, often in a room in his apartment, and sometimes on stage or in studio. He has played in apartments and on stages in the US and Europe. Some highlights were performances at Bozar and Flagey in Brussels, La Philharmonie in Paris, the Oslo Opera House, the ICA in Boston, and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC; and in festivals such as Lucerne Festival, Tanglewood, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Wien Modern, Composit, and Boston GuitarFest.
Maarten enjoys working with composers: picking their brain and messing with their scores with utter dedication and varying degrees of deference. He has premiered compositions by Olga Neuwirth, Raphaël Cendo, Michelle Lou, Mauricio Pauly, Diana Soh, and Santiago Diez-Fischer, and he has worked with Tristan Murail, Salvatore Sciarrino, Philippe Leroux, Chaya Czernowin, Christian Wolff, and Franck Bedrossian on the interpretation of their music.
Recently, Maarten has gotten into collective creative endeavors that move past the old composer-performer paradigm. His partners in this monkey business have been accordionist Luca Piovesan (with whom he makes up the duo Promenade Sauvage) and composer/performer Mauricio Pauly.
Maarten lives in Brussels with his wife Jenn, his son Owen, and his dog Hildie. He is a researcher and professor at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels and at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and a member of the Young Academy of Belgium (Flanders).
A multidimensional pianist, pedagogue, and scholar, Donald Berman has won tremendous acclaim for his “stupendous abilities, both athletic and intellectual” (Boston Sunday Globe) and performances hailed as “stunning, adventurous, and substantive” (New York Times).
With an emphasis on presenting American music of the 20th and 21st centuries, Berman’s inventive recital programs have been featured on the U.S.’s biggest stages for contemporary music — from Carnegie’s Weill and Zankel Halls to Nation- al Sawdust and (Le) Poisson Rouge — as well as major venues across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. An enthusiastic commissioner of new music, he has added more than 200 works to the contemporary canon — many of which he performs alongside classical repertoires to provoke new and fascinating revelations and connections across periods and styles.
Berman’s body of work as a recording artist demonstrates the breadth and depth of his engagement with the music of our time. His albums have included numerous world-premiere recordings as well as illuminating performances of previously unknown works of 20th-century American composers, includ- ing Charles Ives (The Unknown Ives, Vols. I & II), Carl Ruggles (The Uncovered Ruggles), and Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions (Americans in Rome). As concerto soloist and chamber musi- cian, Berman’s discography includes collaborations with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (George Perle: Serenades), soprano Susan Narucki (This Island, The Light That Is Felt: Songs of Charles Ives, and the Grammy-nominated The Edge of Silence), and the Borromeo Quartet (The Worlds Revolve). Upcoming albums include a survey of Elena Ruehr songs with baritone Stephen Salters and a new recording of Ives’s Concord Sonata and Impression of the St. Gaudens in Boston Common, to be released on Avie Records during the composer’s sesquicentennial celebrations in 2024.
A former fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Berman currently serves as Chair of Keyboard Studies at Longy School of Music of Bard College and leads Tufts University’s New Music Ensemble. He is also the General Editor of three volumes of Ives’s Shorter Works for Piano — a titanic project representing 30 years of work — and President and Treasurer of the Charles Ives Society, where he is leading an extensive expansion of the Society’s digital archives on charlesives.org.
Berman’s trajectory as a musician and scholar was set in motion by four important teachers: Mildred Victor, George Barth, John Kirkpatrick (who premiered Ives’s Concord Sonata in 1939), and legendary pedagogue Leonard Shure.
From its beginning in 1980, the Lydian String Quartet (Andrea Segar and Judith Eissenberg, violins; Mark Berger, viola; Joshua Gordon, cello) has been acclaimed by audiences and critics across the USA and abroad for embracing the full range of the string quartet repertory with curiosity, virtuosity, and dedication to the highest artistic ideals of music making. In its formative years, the quartet studied repertoire with Robert Koff, a founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet who had joined the Brandeis University faculty in 1958. Forging a personality of their own, the Lydians were awarded top prizes in international string quartet competitions, including Evian, Portsmouth and Banff, culminating in 1984 with the Naumburg Award for Chamber Music.
In the years to follow, the quartet continued to build a reputation for their depth of interpretation, performing with “a precision and involvement marking them as among the world’s best quartets” (Chicago Sun-Times). Residing at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts since the group’s founding, the Lydians continue to offer compelling, insightful, and dramatic performances of the quartet literature. From the acknowledged masterpieces of the classical, romantic, and modern eras to new remarkable compositions written by today’s cutting-edge composers, the quartet approaches music-making with a sense of exploration and personal expression that is timeless.
The Lydian String Quartet has performed extensively throughout the United States at venues such as Jordan Hall in Boston; the Kennedy Center and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; Lincoln Center, Miller Theater, and Weill Recital Hall in New York City; the Pacific Rim Festival at the University of California at Santa Cruz; and the Slee Beethoven Series at the University at Buffalo. Abroad, the Quartet has made appearances in France, England, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Armenia, and Taiwan.
The Lydians have long championed the commissioning, performing and recording of new works. They enjoy work- ing with young composers at the quartet’s Brandeis home as well as in mini-residencies at universities across the US. Since 2012, the Lydians have expanded the string quartet repertoire through their biennial commission prize, one of the largest chamber music commissioning prizes in the country, resulting in newly commissioned, large-scale works by Kurt Rohde, Steven Snowden, Saad Haddad, Vijay Iyer, Riccardo Zohn-Muldoon, and Lembit Beecher. In recognition of their work, the quartet has received numerous ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, commission grants from the Fromm Foundation, Chamber Music America, Meet the Composer/Rockefeller Foundation/AT&T Jazz Program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
Je découvre ici (comme vous, peut-être) le compositeur Arthur Levering, basé dans la région de Boston. Plusieurs fois récompensé par de nombreux prix et accolades professionnelles, Levering écrit une musique vibrante de textures et de couleurs, dans un langage contemporain sérieux mais plaisant. On y décèle des accointances spectrales chamoisées de modernisme atonal schoenbergien, avec des consonances expressives et discursives typiquement états-uniennes, genre post-John Adams.
C’est intelligent, intellectuellement satisfaisant, émotionnellement affirmé et musicalement stimulant. OceanRiverLake est un triptyque qui se base sur des références musicales à l’eau, sous diverses formes topologiques. Le premier mouvement, vous l’aurez peut-être deviné, évoque La mer de Debussy, sans la citer trop expressément. Le deuxième ramène à Ives et Three Places in New England, alors que le dernier évoque Schoenberg et ses Cinq pièces pour orchestre, op. 16, dont la troisième est intitulée Matin d’été sur le bord du lac. Levering est un maître orchestrateur qui sait déployer une multitude de trésors sonores avec un grand raffinement. C’est un véritable plaisir d’écouter ses partitions, ici jouées avec délicatesse et vigueur (c’est selon) par le Boston Modern Orchestra dirigé par Gil Rose.
Le reste du programme est constitué de partitions chambristes, elles aussi bellement construites en termes coloristiques, harmoniques et texturaux. La combinaison surprenante de Giocattolo, pour piccolo, guitare et célesta, se révèle être tout à fait heureuse. L’œuvre d’environ neuf minutes est un paysage délicatement détaillé et scintillant d’une douce lumière, pleine de picorements sonores qui s’entremêlent habilement. Un petit bijou de poésie musicale.
Squeezebox pour quatuor à cordes est un ensemble de trois miniatures inspirées de la musique celtique, évoquant le son d’un concertina, un instrument de la famille des accordéons. Le jeu des cordes est intelligemment construit de façon à, en effet, évoquer la ’’respiration’’ de cet instrument, sans négliger l’aspect mélodique associé au folklore.
Le programme se termine avec une suite en forme de Thème et variations pour piano, Garland for Steven Stucky. Levering rend ici hommage à un confrère et compatriote décédé en 2016. Il y déploie l’utilisation qu’il fait du principe de compound melody (ausfaltung en allemand, déploiement en français). Stucky avait manifesté de l’intérêt pour cette utilisation faite par Levering. Cette méthode peut être décrite comme l’implication de plus d’une mélodie ou d’une ligne par une seule voix en sautant entre les notes des deux mélodies. Certains exemples probants existent en musique classique : les sonates et partitas de Bach pour violon solo.
Au final, Garland for Steven Stucky est une exploration musicale et conceptuelle assez poussée qui sonne beaucoup mieux, narrativement, que le laisse deviner l’aspect hyper théorique de la démarche. C’est rigoureux, certes, mais ça reste musicalement riche et communicatif.
Si Levering m’était inconnu avant l’arrivée de cette production du label New Focus, sa musique est désormais bien imprimée dans mon esprit. Cet album de très haut niveau vous fera le même effet, si vous aimez la musique dans ce qu’elle de meilleur et de plus avancé.
Translation:
Here I an discovering (as you might also) Boston-area composer Arthur Levering. The recipient of numerous awards and professional accolades, Levering’s music is vibrantly textural and colourful, in a serious but engaging contemporary idiom. It has spectral overtones mixed with Schoenbergian atonal modernism, added to expressive and discursive gestures that are typically American, post-John Adams, say.
It’s brilliant, intellectually satisfying, emotionally assertive and musically stimulating. OceanRiverLake is a triptych based on water-evoking musical references in various topological forms. The first movement, as you may have guessed, evokes Debussy’s La mer, without quoting it too explicitly. The second brings to mind Ives and Three Places in New England, while the last evokes Schoenberg and his Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16, the third of which is entitled Summer Morning by the Lake. Levering is a very good orchestrator who knows how to deploy a multitude of sonic treasures with great refinement. It is a real pleasure to listen to his scores, played here with delicacy or vigour (depending on the movement) by the Boston Modern Orchestra conducted by Gil Rose.
The rest of the programme is made up of chamber scores, also beautifully constructed in colouristic, harmonic and textural terms. The surprising combination of Giocattolo, for piccolo, guitar and celesta, turns out to be quite fortunate. The nine-minute work is a delicately detailed landscape shimmering with a soft light, full of deftly interwoven sonic peckings. A little gem of musical poetry.
Squeezebox for string quartet is a set of three miniatures inspired by Celtic music, evoking the sound of a concertina, an instrument in the accordion family. The string playing is cleverly constructed to evoke the ‘breathing’ of this instrument, without neglecting the melodic aspect associated with folklore.
The programme ends with a suite in the form of a Theme and Variations for piano, Garland for Steven Stucky. Here Levering pays tribute to a colleague and compatriot who died in 2016. In it he deploys his use of the principle of compound melody (ausfaltung in German, déploiement in French). Stucky had expressed an interest in Levering’s use of this principle. This method can be described as the implication of more than one melody or line by a single voice by jumping between the notes of the two melodies. Some convincing examples exist in classical music: Bach’s Sonatas and partitas for solo violin.
In the end, Garland for Steven Stucky is a fairly advanced musical and conceptual exploration that sounds much better, narratively, than the hyper-theoretical aspect of the approach would suggest. It’s rigorous, of course, but musically rich and communicative.
If Levering was unknown to me before the arrival of this production from the New Focus label, his music is now firmly imprinted in my mind. This top-notch album will have the same effect on you, if you love music at its best and most advanced.
— Frédéric Cardin, 11.18.2024
This compilation presents an attractive overview of the scope of Arthur Levering’s creative interests over the past decade and a half or so. Along with the triptych for chamber orchestra OceanRiverLake, after which it is titled, the album contains pieces for mixed trio, string quartet and solo piano. The Boston-based composer, who was born in 1953 in Baltimore, shows himself to be equally at home in all of these formats. An abundance of ideas expressed with economy characterises his music, as does Levering’s flair for formal invention and keen ear for colour and textural clarity – whether writing for a small orchestra or a solo keyboard.
OceanRiverLake is the collective title for three orchestral tone poems that were originally written independently: Il mare dentro (‘The Sea Within’), Flumen (‘River’) and Summer Morning by a Lake. Commissioned in 2008 by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and its founder Gil Rose, who perform all three pieces with exquisite detail and balance, Il mare dentro establishes a soundscape of floating harmonies and subtly shifting timbres intercut with rhythmic agitation.
Though, according to Levering’s commentary, ‘water gurgles, waves crash, sea gulls cry, and fog horns blare’, this piece and its companions are not so much programme music as contemporary reflections on some early modernist turning points that have become associated with water themes. Near Il mare dentro’s end, Levering quotes a passage from ‘Jeux de vagues’ in Debussy’s La mer, while Flumen – perhaps the most breathtaking of the triptych – more obliquely recalls the beginning of ‘The Housatonic at Stockbridge’, the final movement of Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England. Summer Morning by a Lake swerves dramatically in another direction, alluding both to Schoenberg’s ‘Klangfarbenmelodie’ in the third of his Five Pieces for Orchestra (borrowing the title Schoenberg added to please his publisher) and to the drowning scene in Berg’s Wozzeck.
Levering employs a delectable combination of piccolo, guitar (his own instrument) and celesta in the playful Giocattolo (‘Toy’) but also writes idiomatically for string quartet in Squeezebox, a set of miniatures that re-thread Celtic folk music into densely woven – and, in the third movement (‘The Ewe’s Reel’), surreal – textures.
Garland for Steven Stucky, the most recently composed work on the album (2020), is a homage to a dearly missed colleague in the form of 20 variations for solo piano. The theme comprises 48 notes that shape a ‘compound melody’ with vertiginous leaps of register. Donald Berman traces a compelling narrative across its transformations, underscoring Levering’s remarkable harmony of craft with imagination.
— Thomas May, 12.02.2024
Now in his early 70s, Arthur Levering is a well-established Boston composer with a long history of praise in Fanfare (Carson Cooman included a 2014 release, Parallel Universe, on his Want List that year). Levering has received multiple awards and grants, and one sign of his elite status has been his association with Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, who appear here in the album’s title work, OceanRiverLake. The other three pieces are an instrumental trio, string quartet, and solo piano suite. The dates range from 2008 to 2020, recent enough that this collection is like an update to Levering’s four previous albums, which began in 1999.
Independent contemporary composers develop their own tools and elements of a personal musical language. Minimalism is one such tool of Levering’s, and on the evidence of these works he moves freely across a broad landscape of tonality and atonality. Since this is my first encounter, I hesitate to generalize, but his music feels rigorous, controlled, and minutely crafted. Even the most accessible pieces come with enough depth to repay more visits. The experimental and innovative side of New Music, much less the avant-garde, isn’t invoked.
The three tone poems gathered together in the 24-minute OceanRiverLake contain sidelong glances at the past, as explained in the composer’s readable, well-written program note: “All make reference to famous musical depictions of water. Il Mare Dentro (the sea within) briefly quotes a passage from Debussy’s La Mer. Flumen (river) begins with a textural allusion to Charles Ives’s ‘Housatonic at Stockbridge’ from Three Places in New England. Summer Morning by a Lake is built around a single chord, the ‘farben’ chord from the third movement (subtitled “Summer Morning by a Lake”) of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16.”
Levering’s notes are authoritative, and he points to “watery” gestures in the first movement, Il Mare Dentro (“Water gurgles, waves crash, sea gulls cry, and fog horns blare”), which I don’t really connect with. The music is fast-moving, restless, and often delicately textured. Levering develops a vivid, evanescent atmosphere—this, at least, reminded me of La mer—and he uses the sizable chamber orchestra for imaginative color effects. Without being Minimalist, the piece is driven by a repetitive rhythmic pulse, creating a quasi-Minimalist momentum. This blends seamlessly into the Debussy quote, which is positioned to be easily spotted.
“Atmosphere” seems to be the word that most readily comes to mind listening to this triptych. Moving from ocean to river, Flumen (Latin for “river”), there is an allusion to Ives’s piece without quoting it, and a similar connotation of mist veiling the water rather than a flowing current. Repeated string chords give continuity and add an eerie touch. My sense that the titles don’t necessarily offer programmatic hints is underlined by the third movement, whose quick, aggressive nature is discordant with Summer Morning by a Lake. The incongruity is deliberate, given the brief quote of the drowning scene in Wozzeck. Besides the use of Schoenberg’s “color-chord,” this is the closest to atonality or free tonality in the score. Speaking personally, I find the first two movements stronger and more evocative. All receive a reading from Rose and the BMOP that is everything a composer could wish for.
The mixed trio titled Giocattolo (“toy” in Italian) features the unusual scoring of piccolo, guitar, and celesta, which guarantees diaphanous textures and once again that word “atmosphere.” Boston composers naturally call to mind the city’s intellectual strengths, and this musical toy has rigorous underpinnings. To quote Levering, “It’s entirely based on a series of 16 chords, and as though to compensate for the delicate instrumentation, these chords are very thick, being made up of 8 notes each.” The chords are clearly demarcated in formal array before the music turns light, quick, and transparent, moving through sectional variations. I’m not sure that I agree with Levering that the mood is playful, but as Postmodern fairy music, Giocattolo is quite effective.
For Squeezebox we get a live performance by the Lydian String Quartet from Tufts University in 2018. The work’s three miniature movements, lasting from 0:35 to 2:40, are inspired by Celtic folk tunes that give each its title: “The Walls of Liscarroll,” “She Moved through the Fair,” and “Eve’s Reel.” Levering calls this easy music, but there are modernist twists and wrong notes to keep things from sounding literal. The sonority of “Eve’s Reel” is intended to imitate a squeezebox, in honor of a close friend whose ancestor was a famous concertina player in County Clare, Ireland.
Finally, the solo piano suite, Garland for Steven Stucky, is subtitled “Variations on a compound melody”; it consists of a theme with 20 brief variations that range from 0:22 to 2:12. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Stucky, who died in 2016, was a close friend of Levering, and is fondly remembered in the program notes. Levering defines a compound melody as “the suggestion of two or more voices within a single line of music.” A famous example is the wide leaps in register in Bach’s solo violin music, where the upper and lower notes each represent a separate contrapuntal voice. In the present instance, Levering explains, “the 48 notes that make up the theme of Garland are repeated continuously, in all transpositions, layered to form counterpoint, stacked to make chords, broken into fragments.” Each variation states the theme at least once in some form.” To clarify matters, the theme is initially stated a note at a time without harmony. I doubt, however, that general listeners, even with such a clear description in hand, will be able to follow Levering’s intricate, abstract, atonal variations. They hark back to the abstruseness of Carter, Kirchner, and Sessions, where many fear to tread. Donald Berman’s performance is immaculate and presumably definitive.
So much stylistic adroitness and variety are impressive. The two most accessible works, OceanRiverLake and Squeezebox, are good places to enter this collection. The former is much more substantial and for me the most fascinating. Anyone who has been following Levering’s career will consider this release a must-listen.
— Huntley Dent, 11.29.2024
New Focus Recordings is an artist led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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