Little could be more indicative of how far we have come since the bad old days of the Soviet Union and its artistic censorship than (a) the very existence in Russia of a group of top-flight musicians called the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, which was founded by composer Yuri Kasparov in 1990; (b) a recording by this group devoted exclusively to the music of Edison Denisov, who died at the age of sixty-seven at the end of this past November. Certainly, a first listening to most of Denisov's works would seem to reveal more affinity with the music of Pierre Boulez, a friend of the composer, than with the solid and sometimes stolid musical traditions of Denisov's native Russia. Indeed, the work entitled Sur la Nappe d'un étang glacé (On the [Fog] Bank of a Frozen Pond), composed in 1991, is the direct result of the composer's work at IRCAM, the Paris center for contemporary music where he prepared an electronic tape that plays something of a concertante role against the nine acoustic instruments of Sur la Nappe... , whose title comes from a poem by French writer René Char, who also supplied the texts for Boulez's famous Le Marteau sans maître. And one can often hear, in Denisov's pointillistic deployment of instruments such as bells and vibraphone, something of the same fascination with scintillating, latticework timbres one finds in Boulez. But more often than not Denisov's music is not as austere as Boulez's. Even though the atonal harmonic language, which strikes my ears as fairly nonsystematic (although I may be wrong about this), makes it difficult to situate the musical style within one country or another, other elements of Denisov's writing definitely seem to reveal a Russian aesthetic, particularly when involving such things as timbre and structure. The Chamber Symphony No. 2 (1994), which the program notes describe as mostly "animated and excited in character," seems to move forward as a kind of metamorphosis of timbres. There is, for instance, a wonderful moment some six minutes into the work where a flute plays over descending piano figures which, when they begin to rise again, almost imperceptibly give way to the harp. In the morbidly droll final song, about an oyster that has biten off a girl's finger, from the chamber cantata Sun of the Incas (1964), the duet between the soprano and various wood blocks definitely foreshadows parts of Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony. Later in that same movement, chanting from taped male voices adds to the overall grotesquerie. The outer movements of the Three Pictures of Paul Klee (1985) continually feature flowing, clusterlike patterns, while the inner movement is given entirely to the solo viola.

Music like this is difficult to describe briefly, and I could go on for pages writing about a phrase here, an extended passage there, that caught my attention in these works. Suffice it to say that those who are put off by Webernian to Boulezian musical aesthetics will have trouble settling into the works recorded here, which demand careful and repeated listenings. To my ears and sensibilities, Denisov's is a highly original voice, and his music receives highly polished and committed performances from the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, or at least such is my scoreless impression. I particularly like the interactions between soprano Natalia Zagorinskaya's limpid voice and Denisov's constantly changing tapestry of timbres, for which the ensemble finds just the right equilibrium. I do think, though, that the taped electronic sounds in Sur la Nappe ... could have been highlighted more effectively. The music has been realistically and rather drily -- no surprise there -- recorded, and the program notes give the Sun of the Incas texts in English, French, German, and transliterated Russian. But who is this composer spelled out in Cyrillic as "Densiov" on the cover... ?

Royal S. Brown
{From: Fanfare, March/April 1997)