Mathew Rosenblum: Lament/Witches' Sabbath

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"Lament/Witches’ Sabbath", composer Mathew Rosenblum’s new CD on New Focus Recordings, features David Krakauer, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, FLUX Quartet, Mantra Percussion, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Lindsay Kesselman and Lisa Pegher performing four intense and emotionally riveting works that explore the themes of migration, loss, memory, and psychological and cultural transformation. Using a variety of tuning systems, Eastern European lament field recordings, ambient sounds, and pre-recorded voices these works create a compellingly fresh landscape that engages with pertinent issues of our time. 

Audio

“Lament/Witches’ Sabbath”, Mathew Rosenblum’s new CD on New Focus Recordings, features four intense and emotionally riveting works that stretch beyond the conventional to explore themes such as migration, loss, memory, and psychological and cultural transformation. Using a variety of tuning systems, Eastern European lament field recordings, ambient sounds, and pre-recorded voices Rosenblum has created music of great emotional intensity that maximizes the expressive power of his chosen materials.

The title track, Lament/Witches’ Sabbath, written for the extraordinary clarinet soloist David Krakauer and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project led by conductor Gil Rose, is Rosenblum’s most personal piece to date. When he was a child, his grandmother told him the story of how she fled the well-documented 1919 massacre in Proskurov, Ukraine, with six children and pregnant with his mother. Lament/Witches’ Sabbath involves the recounting of his family history by incorporating Ukrainian and Jewish lament field recordings, his grandmother’s recorded voice, klezmer-tinged clarinet with orchestra, and elements from the last movement of Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique, "Witches’ Sabbath.” The heart-rending cadences of the Ukrainian laments communicate a communal pain felt through the generations, and contrast the elements of fear and superstition represented in the Berlioz. Krakauer's powerful, klezmer inflected playing plays the role of protagonist, while the ensemble parts cinematically depict dramatic context. Rosenblum's use of microtonality echoes the expressive pitch world of lament singing, eschewing equal temperament in favor of the sound of unfiltered human emotion. The piece is unsettlingly timely -- tackling topics such as migration, loss, memory, and cultural transformation it comes face to face with current debates surrounding these issues. The piece also represents a reconnection between Rosenblum and Krakauer, high school friends growing up in New York City. In placing the laments at the center of an expansive work of new art music, Rosenblum presents this piece both as a cathartic reconciliation with his family's own personal history and a more universal cry of agony for communities who have endured similar persecution.

Northern Flicker, written for the highly versatile percussion soloist Lisa Pegher, is “a pounding showpiece of rhythmic flair” (NY Times) that blends samples of the Yellow-Shafted Northern Flicker together with the driving rhythmic intensity of avant-rock. The work stands out as a foil on this program of powerfully topical pieces, allowing the listener a palette cleansing moment to focus on Rosenblum’s deft handling of timbre and syntactically driven phrase structure.

Falling, based on the James Dickey poem of the same name as well as a NY Times article chronicling a flight attendant’s unbelievable fall to her death, uses recorded and sung text and microtonality in a manner distinct from Lament/Witches’ Sabbath. Far from the anguished wails of the Ukrainian laments, Rosenblum’s approach in Falling is one of disembodiment and surreality. Prerecorded material of the plane cabin ambient sounds and a narrator’s neutral voice (Dickey) create context and reportage, but the listener is largely insulated from the direct horror of being suddenly thrown into the oxygen-thin air at 30,000 feet. The otherworldly quality of the microtonal pitch language here creates distance between the listener and the events being retold, whereas in Lament, the nuances of microtonal color bring us closer to the humanity of the story. Dedicated to the late composer, Dean Drummond, and commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, Falling is brilliantly performed by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Kevin Noe, conductor, and Lindsay Kesselman, soprano.

Last Round (Ostatnia Runda) can be heard as a merging of the rhythmic intensity of Northern Flicker with the Eastern European melodic tinge of Lament/Witches’ Sabbath. March-like material and descending microtonal sustained passages in the strings lend the work a ritualistic sensibility and simmering intensity. Written for FLUX Quartet and Mantra Percussion and dedicated to the late composer, Lee Hyla, it was described as “impressive,” “visceral” and “tribal ” by The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Mathew Rosenblum’s integration of diverse compositional elements is placed at the service of wide-ranging expressive goals. From the moving setting of his grandmother’s flight from persecution to his eerie contextualization of the truly bizarre tragedy of a flight attendant’s fatal fall, Rosenblum faces issues deeply personal and profoundly universal with an artistic and humanistic voice that communicates forcefully through his chosen materials.

-D. Lippel and M. Rosenblum

"In A Dark Wood," a documentary film about the making and recording of Lament/Witches’ Sabbath, was created by David Bernabo in 2018 and premiered at the JFilm Festival, Pittsburgh (April 30, 2018) and in Europe at the On Art Film Festival, Kraków (August 31, 2018). Filmed in Pittsburgh, New York City, and Boston, the film reminisces on the friendship of Rosenblum and Krakauer while exploring Rosenblum’s remembrance of his grandmother and her story of survival. This moving documentary tells a story of the endurance of family, the winding path of friendship, and the craft of composing music. The film can be viewed at:

vimeo.com/ondemand/lament


Reviews

5

Stereophile

This review and its companion that will follow next week spotlight two very different and equally recommendable recordings of contemporary music with a common theme: the quest for freedom and justice in perilous times. This week's special, Lament/Witches' Sabbath (New Focus Recordings), due out today (November 9), contains four works by Mathew Rosenblum, an East Coast composer who occasionally ventures into forbidden territory as he blends percussion, acoustic instruments, electronics, voice and microtonal elements in extremely visceral, moving, and sometimes gut-wrenching ways.

Recorded in 24/44.1, Rosenblum's recording takes its name from its lead work, the 23-minute Lament/Witches' Sabbath (2017). Performed by Gil Rose's one and only Boston Modern Orchestra Project and the astounding klezmer clarinetist, David Krakauer, Lament/Witches' Sabbath received its premiere this past January at Pittsburgh's Beyond: Microtonal Music Festival, performed by the Beyond Festival Orchestra and Krakauer, both under Rose's baton. The extremely personal work blends klezmer-tinged clarinet with orchestra with historic field recordings of Ukrainian laments and private recordings of Rosenblum's grandmother, Bella Liss, who speaks and sings in Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish.

Liss and her seven children fled Proskurov, Ukraine in 1919 to avoid being massacred. While giving birth to Rosenblum's mother in the woods during her escape, this political refugee crossed the border, sold her silver in Vienna, and emigrated first to Palestine and then to the US. Each Passover, she would gather over 30 relatives in her small apartment in the Bronx and, in an Eastern European lament style that blended song, sobbing, and speaking, recount the saga of her flight from persecution. What Rosenblum does with these elements, in a work that takes some inspiration from the final "Witches' Sabbath" movement of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, is extraordinary.

The thought of a Jewish-themed work about escape from persecution appearing on "record" barely two weeks after the massacre of 11 Jews in the city where the work premiered certainly provides cause for pause. The music itself is so powerful, and the singing and playing so atypically eloquent that they simply must be heard. This is music that transcends speeches, rhetoric, and thoughts and prayers as it cuts straight to the heart.

Rosenblum's three other compositions bring equal rewards, each in its own way. Written for percussion soloist Lisa Pegher, Northern Flicker for Percussion (2012) takes inspiration from the Northern Lights and a Yellow-Shafted Northern Flicker that flew into Rosenblum's yard one afternoon. Energetic, radiant, and energizing, it's a must for both percussion fans and those who revel in the extraordinary.

Falling (2013) is as riveting as it is weird. Based on an James Dickey poem of the same name that traces a 29-year old stewardess's accidental fall from an airplane—a poem that Rosenblum first heard at Music and Art High School in NYC in a recitation by his classmate, Kevin Klein, Falling blends Dickey's recorded reading of the poem with soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion, and piano/keyboard. Try to imagine every thought and sensation that could have possibly gone through the woman's mind and body as she fell to her death, stretch it out to almost 24 minutes, and you may end up with an inkling of what's in store. The Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble under Kevin Noe plays superbly.

Finally, we have Last Round (ostatnia runda) (2015), performed by the four members of the Flux Quartet and the six members of Mantra Percussion for whom it was written. If the performing forces alone are not enough to send the curious amongst us scurrying for this recording, the music itself, which calls for amplified strings, bongos, a variety of small bass drums and metallic percussion, and a set of pipes tuned to a 19 note-to-the-octave scale, will. Violent, aggressive, and filled with color, it's quite the piece.

-Jason Victor Serinus, 11.9.18, Stereophile

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