Hoping to
Draw New Music From a Novelist's Old Poems
By ALLAN KOZINN
September 14, 2004
POETRY/MUSIC REVIEW
Before he
became famous for his novels and screenplays, Paul Auster wrote poetry full of
elusive imagery and observations that varied from the spooky to the amusingly
and philosophically inarguable. Once he turned his attention to prose, 25 years
ago, he left poetry behind. But the publication of "Collected Poems"
(Overlook Press) early this year suggested a project for the Guggenheim
Museum's Works and Process series, which opened its 21st season on Sunday with
a program built on this side of Mr. Auster's work.
With members of the Group
for Contemporary Music performing, the museum presented five newly commissioned
musical settings of Mr. Auster's poetry. Mr. Auster and the composers - Louis
Karchin, Charles Wuorinen, Milton Babbitt, Lee Hyla and Roger Reynolds - were
on hand to discuss their work with the pianist Sarah Rothenberg, and Mr. Auster
provided an illuminating counterpoint to the vocal scores in clear,
straightforward readings of the poems that were set, as well as one
("Facing the Music," from 1979) that wasn't.
The difference between Mr.
Auster's reading and some of the settings raised questions among the composers
themselves. Mr. Karchin, for example, wondered whether his gentle approach to
the final lines of "Matrix and Dream" had been a mistake, since Mr.
Auster read those lines more forcefully. But Mr. Auster once said in an
interview that an author must surrender control of a work once it is finished,
and he apparently holds to that view. He suggested that perhaps his own reading
had been incorrect.
Each score was for voice
and a single instrument. Mr. Karchin, using the conventional piano
accompaniment in "Matrix and Dream," created two worlds: the vocal
line, from start to finish, conveyed the fleeting imagery of the text with an
arclike gracefulness, while the piano began more brashly and lost its dissonant
edges before the final lines.
Mr. Karchin was not the
only composer to treat the vocal and instrumental lines as distinct embodiments
of Mr. Auster's concise notions. Mr. Hyla's "Quarry," for baritone
and viola, clothed the text in a responsive but constricted melody, while the
viola darted madly around it, its bristling figuration and brash coloration
suggesting tensions beneath the poem's placid surface. Mr. Wuorinen's
"Visible," for mezzo-soprano and violin, took a similar path, at
first. As it turned out, Mr. Wuorinen finessed the question of how best to
interpret the poem by setting it three times, the vocal line growing more
emotionally pointed in each.
Mr. Babbitt's
"Autobiography of the Eye," for soprano and cello, is an unusually
direct, lyrical work by this composer's often thorny standards, but that isn't
to say it is superficial: there are moments when the music flirts with means
beyond the plain text. And Mr. Reynolds, in "Consider," set three
excerpts from "White Spaces," a fascinating rumination that Mr.
Auster read from more extensively. The attraction of "Consider" is
Mr. Reynolds's virtuosic writing for French horn. But the baritone line,
sometimes spoken, sometimes inflected with sliding effects, had charms as well
and presented the text with admirable clarity.
The program was more about
the works than the performances, but an assembly of first-rate musicians
brought these pieces to life. The sopranos Lucy Shelton and Judith Bettina, the
mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger and a baritone, Thomas Meglioranza, all sang with
characteristic eloquence and warmth. Their equally superb instrumental
colleagues were Stephen Gosling, pianist; Mark Steinberg, violinist; Fred
Sherry, cellist; Misha Amory, violist; and William Purvis, hornist.
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