David Liptak: Brightening Air

The veteran composer David Liptak brings us a compilation of his music for wind ensemble, where the soprano Tony Arnold and the Eastman Wind Ensemble help illuminate his strong attention to lyricism and orchestration.

“Folgore’s Months” starts the listen with 4 movements that bring tension and grace into the powerful and precise climate that showcases Arnold’s stunning soprano as well as the ensemble’s strong attention to detail.

In the middle, “Surroundings” is an atmospheric 14 minutes that alternates between cinematic, dreamy and colorful as glockenspiel and crotales make an appearance, while “Through The Brightening Air” utilizes winds in a haunting fashion that benefits much from the creative percussion.

“Octet” and “The Sacred Harp” finish the listen, where the former employs layered voices and atypical rhythm, and the latter flows with rich textures from the wind ensemble that embraces folkloric qualities.

Liptak’s music has been played all over the globe and it’s easy to see why; his glowing harmonies, sharp balance and absorbing version of chamber sounds makes for a very appealing listening experience.

— Tom Haugen, 5.28.2022

These five works for winds represent the elite of their genre. Composer David Liptak (b. 1949) wrote all but one for the acclaimed Eastman Wind Ensemble, which gives performances fully up to their past standard. The culture of American wind ensembles embraces a wide network of music schools and universities. The last time most of us encountered wind music, aside from famous classical works like Mozart’s wind serenades, was in the context of marching bands. But the emergence of sophisticated wind ensembles and orchestras across the country has engendered music of serious interest for decades now.

Liptak, who is professor of composition at the Eastman School, didn’t write the earliest work here, Soundings from 1982, for the Eastman Wind Ensemble, but did so with its specific sound in mind. Having heard them play during his student years at Eastman, he was aware for the first time of wind music written not for massed instruments but with individual solo parts. His own style continues in that vein, most markedly in his Octet, which uses the same unique instrumentation as Stravinsky’s Octet of 1923: pairs of trumpets, trombones, and bassoons, a flute and clarinet. Stravinsky’s score marked his turn to Neoclassicism, and Liptak may have picked up on Stravinsky’s spiky austerity, dryness, and angularity while assimilating these qualities into his own syntax. (The subtitle “It Began with a Dream” refers to a dream in which Stravinsky first envisioned the makeup of his piece—he found himself in a small room with the same eight instruments playing pleasant music.)

In Liptak’s score there is also the close harmonization one associates with Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which has the effect of suspending time. Hunting for clues and associations is common in the context of today’s musical eclecticism, which draws from the entire panoply of music history. Like everything else on this disc, Liptak’s Octet exemplifies a major strength, his imaginative use of instrumental color. Whether we notice it or not, wind ensembles remind our ears of what isn’t there, namely, the string section. By their nature strings are the emotional core of a symphony orchestra, while the woodwinds and brass add color, accent, and character. Remove this emotional core, and it is a considerable challenge to make winds take over the same role. To help out, modern wind-band composers tend to lean on tonality, often recalling notable American predecessors, neo-Romantic and otherwise, like Dello Joio, Persichetti, Flagella, and Hanson. If the tonalism is too backward-looking, it can sound like foot-dragging. Liptak adroitly inserts dissonance, often in sharp, angular accents, and employs the wide-spaced intervals that replace melody in contemporary music. But he allies dissonant gestures with a dedication to melody at the same time—this is another hallmark of his personal expression.

To me, the most striking and successful example of his style comes in Folgore’s Months, the only vocal work here. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets (1861) there are translations of sonnets by the 14th-century Tuscan poet Folgóre de San Gimignano. As the composer’s helpful program notes inform us, “The twelve sonnets describe scenes associated with each of the twelve months, portraying hunting, games and sports, feasting, and other pastimes of Sienese youths of the nobility.” The texts provide a glimpse into the courtly elegance (and ample leisure hours) of medieval life among the rich. The four months selected here—February, August, May, and December—aren’t vehicles for quasi-early music pastiche on Liptak’s part. He employs the intense, high-flying vocal writing that spans from Schoenberg’s Ewartung to Thomas Adès’s The Tempest. The brass writing here can be as sonorous as a Gabrieli canzone or as raucous as Messiaen. The stratospheric vocal range demanded by the work fits the talents of Tony Arnold, a soprano who specializes in contemporary chamber music; she is closely associated with George Crumb but has recorded extensively across the map of thorny vocal works of the past century.

Liptak’s four songs are as challenging as anything in the genre, and yet Folgore’s Months is strikingly original and absorbing. The soundstage is expanded with percussion, particularly mallet instruments, to create an arresting atmosphere. What one loses, almost inevitably, is an emotional connection with the original medieval texts, because the vocal line is so hard to enunciate and the musical idiom so divorced from subject matter like hunting, horse racing, and banqueting. Fortunately, the musical rewards are rich enough to overcome this drawback, and complete texts are provided to make it easy to follow the singer.

Within the space limitations of this review I can’t detail the other works on the program, which span from 1982 to 2017, but I don’t intend a backhanded compliment when I say that Liptak’s sophistication surprised me coming from a wind ensemble—these pieces easily compare with the best contemporary American composers, and attesting to that, Liptak has many prestigious commissions to his credit, from the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations, for example, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Rounding everything out, the conducting by Mark Scatterday is exemplary and the recorded sound very fine. Nothing here is fiercely atonal, and a good deal falls easily on the ear if you are accustomed to the music of Peter Maxwell Davies and Oliver Knussen. There is the same authentic feeling and willingness to communicate to the listener. In short, this release builds a bridge to contemporary music that all are welcome to cross.

— Huntley Dent, 7.15.2022

David Liptak is a US American composer and teacher, faculty member of the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, NY. As always, the question arises whether a teacher of composition can actually compose. At least something that is listenable.

The answer here is 'yes, but, Liptak's music is decidedly orchestral. This CD compiles a number of his wind instrument works. The Eastman Wind Ensemble that performs here is renowned for its quality and performances, and it craftily supplies the necessary pressure and orchestral quality to Liptak's work. As with many US American composers, the music is somewhat un-modern. That is to say, it owes little to the last 70 years of contemporary classical music and is more rooted in the later parts of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Luckily, the slightly film-score attributes of much of the early 20th century US American composers are largely (see below) lacking here. And due to the concentration on wind instruments, it is hard to link to composers of maybe similar approaches such as Tippett. It is more Elgar that comes to mind or Shostakovich in the more symphonic passages. Not exactly, as Liptak's work has a very own character, but it gives you an idea of the mood of his music.

The recordings start with 'Folgore's Month', apparently an adaptation of sonnets of 14th-century Italian poet Folgore da San Gimignano in four movements depicting four months of the year. As always, it remains the composer's secret why these are relevant today. They are performed by soprano singer Tony Arnold, whom Liptak has worked before. Although the soprano would not normally persist against the might of the wind ensemble (mind, this is not a chamber quartet, but a full orchestra), and the opening of the first movement is a full-blast orchestra, the music can give the voice the space it needs. Moreover, the voice, being a wind instrument in itself, does blend surprisingly well with the score.

The following pieces, 'Soundings' and the title track 'Through the brightening air' explore the sound possibilities of the wind ensemble to the full, never boring and using the wind instruments and accompanying percussion to best result. They are followed by the 4-movement 'Octet', which reduces the ensemble to chamber size. This results in more emphasis on the single instruments and the sound qualities now replacing the orchestral (super-)power. The four movements make good use of different moods and sound colours.

The final take, 'The sacred harp,' finally does fall into the pit of film score music. Why is the harp 'sacred', and why do we speak of a 'harp' when this is a wind ensemble. Puzzles. The music unnecessarily drives towards the apocalyptic scenes of an apocalypse movie, proving my point above. This
release would have been better off without this last track.

— Robert Steinberger, 2.15.2022

Winds are used very differently by David Liptak of the Eastman School of Music on a (+++) New Focus Recordings CD featuring five of his works as played by the school’s justly renowned wind ensemble. Liptak’s interest in these pieces is primarily in massed sound and combinatorial sonorities that are far from intimate and, although expressive in their own way, are quite distant from the intimate emotion conveyed by Brahms. Folgore’s Months (2008) is based on four 14th-century sonnets by Folgore da San Gimignano, each intended to illustrate a specific month and all combining massed winds with words sung by soprano Tony Arnold. The vocal writing is pointed, melismatic, and rather self-consciously “contemporary” in its alternation of smooth passages with angular, almost screechy ones. The ensemble is treated differently in each movement: in February it is brassy, chordal and rhythmic; in August it is milder, although scarcely lyrical; in May it is impulsive and driven; in December it is on the quiet, even mysterious side. The remaining works on the disc do not have a vocal component. Soundings (1982) is dominated not by winds but by percussion: individual winds are contrasted with massed percussive exclamations. Through the Brightening Air (2017) is especially effective in its use of winds to establish an atmospheric opening, and its lighter, dancelike middle section is effective, although Liptak’s penchant for chordal exclamations is prominent here too from time to time. Octet (2005/2015) is the most-interesting piece on the disc, a short four-movement suite that starts by creating layers of sound, continues with bouncy rhythmic sections separated by full-ensemble pauses, moves to a quieter place with more lyricism than Liptak usually offers, and concludes with a movement that mixes stop-and-start elements with massed sound in the way that Liptak clearly favors throughout the works on this CD. The recording ends with The Sacred Harp (1994), an occasional piece for an academic ceremony that eschews, or rather disguises, the inevitable fanfare-like celebratory elements expected under such circumstances in favor of Liptak’s preferred massed sonorities and, somewhat surprisingly, some melodic material that is more-straightforward than he usually presents. All the pieces are very well played by the Eastman Wind Ensemble under Mark Scatterday, and the CD will certainly be of interest to wind performers. But its determined abandonment of wind instruments’ more-lyrical, more-expressive elements makes it less than fully effective for a general audience.