Of Punks, Trouts and Finns

By Michael Walsh |

Laurie Anderson: United States Live (Warner Bros., five disks). Laurie Anderson's United States, Parts I-IV, which premiered two years ago at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is the work that first brought the avant-garde form of performance art to a wide audience. A dazzling synthesis of music, narration and film, Anderson's free-associating view of American materialism was marked by both wry humor (I dreamed I had to take a test in a Dairy Queen on another planet, goes one section) and an imaginative use of technology: with a device called a Vocoder, she can speak and sing in chords. Anderson's unsettling imagery and aggressively minimalist music hardly make for relaxing listening, but United States is a landmark in the art of the '80s, a guided tour through a post-punk apocalypse led by an innocent at home whose sense of the ironic is the only sure road map.

Kodaly: Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8; Duo for Violin and Cello, Op. 7 (Jerry Grossman, cello; Daniel Phillips, violin; Nonesuch). Except for the Hary Janos Suite and perhaps the choral Psalmus Hungaricus, Zoltan Kodaly's music is not much heard today, only 16 years after his death. It is his contemporary, friend and colleague, Bela Bartok, who seems to have won the Hungarian seat in the 20th century pantheon of great composers. But Kodaly's music, while less frankly adventurous than Bartok's, is just as redolent of the Magyar spirit, and these two works display it well. The fiery Duo (1914), full of rich and varied strong sonorities, gets a passionate reading from Phillips, who has a flourishing chamber-music career, and Grossman, a Chicago Symphony cellist. Even better is the brooding Sonata (1915), which employs just about every string-writing trick there is, including left-hand pizzicato and scordatura (nonstandard tuning). As close to technical impossibility as a piece can be and still remain playable, the Sonata is a 20th century masterpiece that deserves to be known by all music lovers, not just cellists. Grossman's performance, while not as pyrotechnical as, say, Janos Starker's, captures all the work's quintessentially Hungarian soulfulness.

Schubert: Piano Quintet in A Major, "Trout" (Emanuel Ax, piano, with members of the Guarneri Quartet and Julius Levine, double bass); Mozart: Eine kleine Nachtmusik (Guarneri Quartet with Julius Levine; RCA). Schubert's ineffable "Trout" Quintet, so named for its use of the composer's song The Trout as the basis of the fourth movement, is one of the glories of the chamber-music repertory, beloved of pianists and string players (and audiences) everywhere for its grace, wit and warmth. Ax's sensitive, full- toned pianism and the Guarneri's rich ensemble are perfectly matched here, to each other and to the piece. Some readings of the "Trout" emphasize its sparkle and brio, but this one favors a relaxed elegance: it is less a day at the beach than a month in the country. A bonus (the "Trout" frequently occupies an entire disk) is the Mozart chestnut, played by the Guarneri and Levine instead of the more familiar small string orchestra. The five musicians give a sophisticated, gracious performance.

Copland: Piano Music (James Tocco, piano; Pro Arte). Although probably best known for his ballets (Rodeo, Billy the Kid), Aaron Copland produced several piano pieces that are among the most important composed for the instrument in the 20th century. Tocco plays one of them on this disk, the 1931 Piano Variations, a harsh, spare twelve-minute essay in modernism. But the album is leavened with Copland arrangements of pieces in his more familiar, folkish vein, too. Among them: Four Episodes from Rodeo, which includes the bracing Buckaroo Holiday and the high-spirited Hoe-Down, and three excerpts from the 1940 film score for Our Town, a set of disarming, emotionally uncomplicated sketches. Tocco plays with admirable clarity and a forceful technique that permits him to face down the difficulties of the Variations. At the same time, he convincingly evokes the simple verities of Thornton Wilder's fictional New England village of Grover's Corners.

John Alden Carpenter: Sea Drift; Henry Hadley: Scherzo Diabolique; Daniel Gregory Mason: Chanticleer (Festival Overture); Quincy Porter: Dance in Three- Time (Julius Hegyi conducting the Albany Symphony Orchestra; New World Records). Carpenter, Hadley, Mason and Porter belong to a lost generation of American composers, craftsmen who had the misfortune to be writing in a conservative style during the first half of the tumultuous 20th century. Because it is fashionable today to prize rebellion and revolution in art, their work has been all but forgotten. That is a shame: Mason's Chanticleer (1926), for example, might have been written by a Frenchified Wagner, and Porter's Dance (1937) is a grave, gracious minuet with echoes of Vincent D'Indy. But the real discovery is Carpenter's Sea Drift (1933), a darkling ocean vista as grand and implacable as the Atlantic on a still November morning. The Albany Symphony is not a major orchestra, but its commitment to unusual music allows it to make the case for these works very persuasively.

Sibelius: Symphony No. 2; Scenes with Cranes from "Kuolema" (Simon Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Angel). The Second is Sibelius' most popular and representative symphony, a broad-shouldered, expansive showpiece for orchestra that conjures up a heroic, rugged vision of the Finnish countryside. Simon Rattle, 30, the bright hope of British conducting, and his City of Birmingham Orchestra give it a taut, dramatic reading that never wallows in the bathos some conductors insist is part of Sibelius' aesthetic. They ought to study the spare, shadowy Fourth Symphony, Sibelius' masterpiece. And Rattle, who has a Sibelius symphony cycle under way for Angel, ought to record it soon.