Arturo Rodríguez FROM EARTH TO MARS

Winner of Mexico’s Mozart medal (1996), Arturo Rodríguez is an established composer of film and concert music, and a frequent guest conductor in orchestras around the world. He has been commissioned to write music for The Kennedy Center Imagination Celebration of Fort Worth, The Honorary Consulate of Malaysia in Monterrey, Mexico, CONARTE, The Southeastern Festival of Song, The San Francisco Song Festival, UNAC/Monterrey, Orquesta Sinfónica de la UANL, Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas, ProArte Chamber Orchestra, and Langley Wind Symphony, among others.
Rodríguez recently completed his first feature-length film score for the Mexican production “Cuando las Cosas Suceden.” This soundtrack, conducted by Rodríguez and performed by the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra, and his first album release, “From Earth to Mars: A Symphonic Journey,” performed by The New Millennium Philharmonic and recorded in Indianapolis, Indiana, are available on the internet.
His musical studies initiated in Monterrey, Mexico at UANL’s Music School and continued at the National Music Conservatory of Mexico, Texas Christian University’s School of Music and the School of Music at Butler University. He has been a selected participant for the ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop in Hollywood (2003), the ASPEN Film Scoring Workshop (2001) and the 11th NYU Composer’s Seminar (2003).
Arturo Rodríguez has studied with maestros José Feghali and Panayis Lyras (piano); Germán Gutiérrez and Stanley DeRusha (orchestral conducting), Mario Lavista (20th Century music analysis), Blas Emilio Atehortúa (composition and orchestration), Richard Bellis (film music) and John Corigliano in Aspen (composition/film music).

From Earth to Mars is Arturo Rodriguez's first recording. The title work was commissioned by The Kennedy Center Imagination Celebration of Fort Worth and first premiered in Fort Worth, Texas by The TCU Symphony in December 2000. Mosaico Mexicano is the composer's first orchestral work. It was written in 1998 and first premiered in Dallas, Texas in May 2000 by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

From Earth to Mars

1) Overture [8:10]

2) Farewell to Earth [2:13]

3) The Launch [4:42]

4) The Journey Afar [4:09]

5) Red Planet [8:56]

6) The Landing [3:56]

7) Epilogue / The End [6:47)

8) Mosaico Mexicano [11:20]

Composed and conducted by Arturo Rodríguez

2004 Sueños de Luna Music

1 CD DDD

SDLR 5020

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Gustavo Dudamel RITE Stravinsky / Revueltas

Even though the programming of works on an album is often intended to highlight their similarities, it can just as often point up sharp differences between them. It's apparent that Igor Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du printemps" and Silvestre Revueltas' "La Noche de los Mayas" were combined on Gustavo Dudamel's 2010 release, Rite, for their common themes of ritual and the rhythmic impulse. As the modernist masterpiece par excellence, and as a revolutionary musical exploration of prehistoric Russia, Stravinsky's "Le Sacre" speaks for itself, and many composers have turned to it for inspiration. Less well-known to concertgoers is the intense music of Revueltas, which was often inspired by Mexican traditions, most famously in his tone poem "Sensemayá." "La Noche de los Mayas" is a suite derived from Revueltas' 1939 score for a film of the same name, and though it has its own distinctive folk-like character, which is unmistakably Mexican in flavor, it has been compared quite loosely to "Le Sacre" only because of its savage final section, "Noche de encantamiento," where the orchestra explodes in a riot of instrumental colors and dynamic percussion. Yet the lush orchestration, tuneful themes, and simpler tonal harmonic language of "La Noche"'s early sections seem more akin to something by Manuel de Falla or Darius Milhaud, rather than Stravinsky, and they fall short of the dread and violence of "Le Sacre." Dudamel's performance of Stravinsky's score with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela is riveting in its intensity, and there are several shudder-worthy moments, especially in the second half of the ballet. To follow it, the irresistible "Sensemayá" would have been the ideal choice, but because Dudamel already released that work on his 2008 album, Fiesta, the thrills of the final part of La noche de los Mayas will have to suffice, if only to satisfy seekers of sensational ritualistic music. But the last 10 minutes of this album pack a wallop, so comparisons between "Noche de encantamiento" and the "Danse sacrale" of "Le Sacre" are quite apt. (Blair Sanderson, Rovi)

Igor Stravinsky (1882 - 1971)
Le Sacre du Printemps
Revised version for Orchestra (published 1947)
Part 1: The Adoration of the Earth
1. Introduction [3:20]
2. The Augurs of Spring: Dances of the Young Girls [3:13]
3. Ritual of Abduction [1:16]
4. Spring Rounds [4:06]
5. Ritual of the Rival Tribes [1:52]
6. Procession of the Sage [0:43]
7. The Sage [0:24]
8. Dance of the Earth [1:18]
Part 2: The Sacrifice
9. Introduction (Largo) [4:36]
10. Mystic Circles of the Young Girls [3:20]
11. Glorification of the Chosen One [1:33]
12. Evocation of the Ancestors [0:39]
13. Ritual Action of the Ancestors [3:19]
14. Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen One) [4:20]

Silvestre Revueltas (1899 - 1940)
La Noche de los Mayas
15. 1. Noche de los Mayas (Molto sostenuto) [7:38]
16. 2. Noche de Jaranas (Scherzo) [5:04]
17. 3. Noche de Yucatan (Andante espressivo) [7:17]
18. 4. Noche de Encantamiento (Tema y variaciones) [9:57]

Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela
Gustavo Dudamel

2010 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH
1 CD DDD
477 8775 4 GH

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Takemitsu I HEAR THE WATER DREAMING

Toru Takemitsu clearly loved writing for the flute: he used it many times as a solo instrument and in chamber music, and collaborated with several leading players to explore its full potential. The flute's elemental simplicity brings it close than most other orchestral instruments to the natural world which was Takemitsu's primary inspiration, yet its many possible variations of tone-production and fingering allow extraordinarily subtle colouring of phrases and even individual notes.
Takemitsu frequently made transcriptions not only of the works of other composers but also of his own music. For example, his Toward the Sea exists in three different versions. The first, for alto flute and guitar, was written in 1981, as a contribution to the Greenpeace Foundation's "Save the Whales" campaign. The work's first transcription, as Toward the Sea II for alto flute, harp and string orchestra, was made later in 1981; Toward the Sea III, for alto flute and harp, did not follow until 1989.
Takemitsu composed I Hear the Water Dreaming, for flute and orchestra, in 1987, for the American flautist Paula Robison. Here the idea of water is linked with a concept which was central to Takemitsu's view of music, that of dreaming. Here the association is mediated through another art-form: in this case, through a Western Australian aboriginal painting called "Water Dreaming", full of mythological symbols.
The idea of dreaming is paired not with water but with the movement of air in And Then I Knew 'twas Wind, for flute, viola and harp, written in 1992. Takemitsu took his title from a line of a poem by Emily Dickinson, and explained that the work has as its subject the signs of the wind in the natural world and of the soul. Our unconscious mind (or we could even call it 'dream'), which continues to blow, like the wind, invisibly, through human consciousness. And Then I Knew 'twas Wind was written for the Swiss flautist Aurèle Nicolet, and it was in honour of Nicolet's approaching 70th birthday that Takemitsu composed his Air for solo flute at the end of 1995. This beautifully crafted miniature was drawn from a projected work for flute, harp and orchestra which remained unfinished on Takemitsu's death in February 1996, at the age of 65. (Anthony Burton)

Toru Takemitsu (1930 - 1996)
1) I Hear the Water Dreaming [10:45]
Toward the Sea I
2) 1. The Night [3:23]
3) 2. Moby Dick [4:06]
4) 3. Cape Cod [3:32]
5) Le fils des étoiles (after Satie's "La Vocation") [4:11]
Toward the Sea II
6) 1. The Night [3:32]
7) 2. Moby Dick [3:56]
8) 3. Cape Cod [3:33]
9) And Then I Knew 't Was Wind [13:05]
Toward the Sea III
10) 1. The Night [3:29]
11) 2. Moby Dick [3:55]
12) 3. Cape Cod [3:22]
13) Air for flute solo [5:35]

Patrick Gallois
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Andrew Davis
Göran Söllscher
Fabrice Pierre
Pierre-Henri Xuéreb

2000 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg
1 CD DDD
20 / 21 Series
453 4592 5 GH

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Kronos Quartet HENRYK GÓRECKI Already It Is Dusk - Quasi una Fantasia (reuploaded)

Already It Is Dusk was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet (to which it is dedicated) by Doris and Myron Beigler and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. It was first performed at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, on 21 January 1989.

The opening words of a four-part.church-song by the 16th-century Polish composer Waclaw z Szamotul provide the quartet with its title, and an extended version of the entire tenor melody is both the basis of the opening Molto lento and the source of everything that follows. Gorécki had already used the same melody to very different purpose in his Muzyka Staropolska, op. 24 (Old Polish Music), where it is converted into granite pillars of note-against-note serial counterpoint, and "answered," brazenly, by transformations of a 14th-century organum. In the Molto lento of the quartet, Szamotul's original melody is prominently presented by the viola as cantus firmus in a "retrograde-inverse" canon whose highly dissonant (polymodal) counterpoint has, so to speak, traversed the cathedral-nave of Muzyka Staropolska, and entered a small and unoccupied side-chapel. (David Drew)

Górecki began Quasi una Fantasia in his home city of Katowice on his 57th birthday, 6 December 1990, and finished the score three months later on 19 March 1991. Commissioned by the Beigler Trust, Lincoln Center for the performing Arts and the Kosciuzko Foundation, and dedicated to the Kronos Quartet, it is the third in a series of major chamber pieces written in the past twenty years. It was preceded by Recitatives and Ariosos-Lerchenmusik, for clarinet, cello and piano, Op. 53 (1985) and Already It Is Dusk (String Quartet No. 1), Op. 62 (1988). As a group, they represent a renewal of the composer's interest in instrumental music during a decade of writing mainly for the voice. (Adrian Thomas)

HENRYK GÓRECKI (b. 1933)

Already It Is Dusk

String Quartet No. 1, Op. 62 (1988)

1) DECISO; MOLTO LENTO-TRANQUILLO; ALLEGRO DECISO-GRIDANDO; MARTELLANDO-TEMPESTOSO; MOLTO LENTO-TRANQUILLISSIMO (13:59)

Quasi una Fantasia

String Quartet No. 2, Op. 64 (1990/91)

2) I. LARGO SOSTENUTO-MESTO (8:07)

3) II. DECISO-ENERGICO; FURIOSO, TRANQUILLO-MESTO (6:45)

4) III. ARIOSO: ADAGIO CANTABILE (7:24)

5) IV. ALLEGRO-SEMPRE CON GRANDE PASSIONE E MOLTO MARCATO; LENTO-TRANQUILLISSIMO (9:31)

KRONOS QUARTET:

David Harrington, violin

John Sherba, violin

Hank Dutt, viola

Joan Jeanrenaud, cello

1993 Elektra/Nonesuch

1CD 9 79319-2

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Pletnev plays Chopin

Given his mercurial personality I suppose it's to be expected that Mikhail Pletnev will sometimes perplex to the same degree as he delights. I'm an admirer: forget received ideas, go along with the boldness of his imagination and be prepared to be challenged by it, and the rewards can be special. From time to time you catch a whiff of shock tactics, true, but these are part of the armoury and, for me. Pletnev's insights have almost always outweighed the occasional obtrusiveness of manner. I have enjoyed him in Haydn, Mozart, Scarlatti, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, and certainly in other Chopin. His B flat minor 'Funeral March' Sonata on Virgin Classics (3/95) seems to me superb. But having taken my time over getting to grips with his Chopin here - his first piano recording for DG - I'm disinclined to persevere further. It is a great disappointment.
The playing is certainly amazing: who could be dismissive of virtuosity which launches the Etudes in G flat (Op. 10 No. 5) and G sharp minor (Op. 25 No. 6- tracks 7 and 8, respectively) as he does and sustains them in such dazzling trajectories? The first, the so-called 'Black Key' Etude, goes off like a shot from a gun. Well, no harm, surely, in thrilling to it as a spectacle once in a while - and what sound. Go on to the other Etude in the group, however, the long slow one in C sharp minor from Op. 25 (track 9), for an example of what I dislike about the disc. There, the melody is crooned rather than sung, the line continuously nudged and fussed over as if being treated with a personal brand of performance practice. If you took it down from dictation it would look very different from what Chopin wrote. Not that one is asking for literalness, of course not, but Pletnev's distortions are a long way from tempo rubato as I understand it. The slow Waltz in A minor, Op. 34 No. 2, is similarly disfigured. The manner is would-be soulful but we are not given the real thing.
It's not just the slow numbers which distress. Everywhere the effect is of a virtuoso toying with the surface of the music. Surface. I think, is the word - the deftness and play of colour take your breath away but the impressions left behind are expressively light. The slighter pieces such as the E minor Waltz and the Ecossai.s.es (tracks 4 and 5), do not suffer too badly, yet even there one feels they are being patronized; and in the great A flat major Waltz. Op. 34 No. 1, the brilliance and catand-mouse manner are heartless.
In the first movement of the B minor Sonata I lose Pletnev completely. At nearly 15 minutes with the repeat of the exposition and my heart sank when he went back to the beginning it seems impossibly discursive. Every detail is turned over to see what it can be made to yield; after a while you lose any sense of differentiation, of 'events' of any kind. Local harmonic colour is spotlit at the expense of the broader ebb and flow and Chopin's paragraphs of connected thought disintegrate into rhapsody. We are in a maze. We could be anywhere. Stop it, I want to object the music is enough.
The Fantasie in F minor is more successful because Pletnev's projection is not so adrift from the breadth of its harmonic movement; and a sense of engagement with the great power of its narrative, so missing in the sonata, does come across. Here his virtuosity too is better in place, as the servant of the message. DG's recording is perfectly good, without I think being the equal of the all-Scriabin recital Pletnev did as his last disc for Virgin Classics (10/97). (BM, Gramophone, December 1997)

Frédéric Chopin (1810 - 1849)
1. Fantaisie in F minor, Op.49 [15:01]
2. Waltz No.2 in A flat, Op.34 No.1 - "Valse brillante" [5:01]
3. Waltz No.3 in A minor, Op.34 No.2 [5:31]
4. Waltz No.14 in E minor, Op.posth. [2:53]
5. Three Ecossaises op.post 72, no.3 - 1, 2 + 3 [2:10]
6. Impromptu No.1 in A flat, Op.29 [4:15]
12 Etudes, Op.10
7. No. 5 in G flat "Black Keys" [1:39]
12 Etudes, Op.25
8. No. 6 in G sharp minor [1:55]
9. No. 7 in C sharp minor [5:49]
Piano Sonata No.3 in B minor, Op.58
10. 1. Allegro maestoso [14:28]
11. 2. Scherzo (Molto vivace) [2:43]
12. 3. Largo [10:35]
13. 4. Finale (Presto non tanto) [5:21]

Mikhail Pletnev

1997 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg
1 CD DDD
453 4562 8 GH

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Kronos Quartet BLACK ANGELS (reuploaded)

This disc is supposed to hurt. Just look at the program: it starts with Crumb's "Black Angels for electric string quartet," a work that is the aural equivalent of Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and ends with Shostakovich's "String Quartet No. 8," a work that is either the aural equivalent of a monument to the victims of war and fascism written in the ruins of Dresden or the musical equivalent of a suicide note written before the composer joined the Communist Party. With the spooky and evocative performances of Thomas Tallis "Spem in Alium," Istvan Marta's "Doom. A Sigh," and Charles Ives' "There They Are!," this disc is so painful it could be the soundtrack for an unmade Kubrick movie.
The question is, is this disc supposed to hurt so much? The Kronos Quartet is a harsh and aggressive ensemble with an angular approach to rhythm and structure and an overwhelming need to assert its individual and collective identity. It tears into the howling notes that begin "Black Angels" with the ferocity of "The Furies" and they don't take the pedal off the metal until the last gasp of the final Largo of the "Eighth." Yet surely this is the intent of the music: Crumb's "Black Angels" is as violently anti-war as Shostakovich's "Eighth" is fatally anti-totalitarian, and any performance that doesn't hurt with the deep pain of righteous vehemence would hardly be worth hearing. Nonesuch's 1990 digital sound is so in your face that it's in your skull. (James Leonard)

Stylishly packaged, intelligently programmed, superbly recorded and brilliantly performed. In short, very much the sort of disc we've come to expect from the talented and imaginative Kronos Quartet.With an overall theme of war and persecution linking the works, the disc opens with George Crumb's Black Angels for electric string quartet; a vividly descriptive work inspired by the Vietnam war. It dates from 1970 (it was completed somewhat ominously on Friday, March 13th) and is described by Crumb as "a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world". Those familiar with Crumb's works will be aware of his fondness for asking his performers to double on other instruments, and here a gamut of sounds ranging from gongs, maracas and crystal glasses, to vocal sounds such as chanting, whistling and whispering combine with Crumb's colourful, imaginative string writing. (MS, Gramophone, April 1991)

The title to Kronos's most bleak album comes from a nearly 20- minute-long composition by American composer George Crumb that unfolds over 13 distinct parts. That ominous number only hints at the horror Crumb intended as an ode to the Vietnam War. War informs the whole CD: Shostakovich's Quartet No. 8, composed near the height of the Cold War, in 1960, was dedicated "to the victims of fascism and war." "Doom. A Sigh," by Istvan Marta, incorporates field recordings of two Romanian women singing personal laments of fallen friends and relatives; their grief is so intense as to render listening incredibly difficult. The original text to 16th-century composer Thomas Tallis's "Spem in Alium" (originally a 40-voice motet) recalled a biblical battle. And late American composer Charles Ives is heard singing "They Are There!"--a ditty he wrote during the Great War and revisited for World War II; he's joined here by the Kronos, half a century after his death, in an act of studio magic that is ingenious if not musically stimulating. (Marc Weidenbaum)

Black Angels, for electric string quartet Composed by George Crumb
1. I. Departure
2. II. Absence
3. III. Return
4. Spem in Alium, motet for 40 voices, P. 299 Composed by Thomas Tallis
5. Doom. A Sigh, for voice & Roumanian folk ensemble Composed by Istvan Marta
6. They Are There!, song for voice & piano, S. 371 (K. 6B79) Composed by Charles Ives
String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110 Composed by Dmitry Shostakovich
7. I. Largo
8. II. Allegro molto
9. III. Allegretto
10. IV. Largo
11. V. Largo


KRONOS QUARTET:
DAVID HARRINGTON, violin
JOHN SHERBA, violin
HANK DUTT, viola
JOAN JEANRENAUD, cello

1990 Elektra Entertainment
1 CD DDD 9 79242-2

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