Thomas Oboe Lee: Six Concertos – Gil Rose

There is a particular pleasure in encountering a composer who refuses to sit still, who has lived enough lives to make a single style feel like a cage. Thomas Oboe Lee (yes, that really is his middle name, bestowed by an American friend of his player parents back in China, and he has kept it with evident relish) is such a composer. Born in Shanghai to nightclub singers, raised for a time in Rio, schooled eventually at Harvard and the New England Conservatory. His biography reads like liner notes waiting to happen, and for once the music delivers on the promise.

Two discs, six concertos, none of them longer than half an hour and most considerably shorter. That economy is itself a kind of statement. Lee doesn’t overstay his welcome. He gets in, makes his case with tunes you can hum on the way out, and gets out again before the argument grows stale.

Flauta Carioca is the disc’s guilty pleasure: Rio transplanted wholesale into the concert hall, with Sarah Brady’s flute skipping through syncopations that owe less to Poulenc or Ibert than to João Gilberto’s guitar. The middle movement, marked simply “Bossa nova,” is unabashed about its debts; you can practically smell the cigarette smoke of some Copacabana boîte circa 1963. One small complaint: somebody in the percussion section fell in love with the triangle and never fell back out. It dings away underneath Brady’s cadenza with a persistence that borders on the comic, and not in a way I think Lee intended.

The harp concerto, bisbigliando (a word borrowed from harp artistry meaning a shimmering, whispered tremolo, though the title’s exact application here remains something of a mystery to this listener), gives Ina Zdorovetchi a vehicle of real distinction. Her slow movement is the loveliest thing on either disc, spun out with a hush and delicacy that recalls, oddly, late Fauré more than Rio. The finale, built on repeating cells, doesn’t quite match it. Lee sometimes trusts a good groove to do more work than it can.

Then the mood darkens, and darkens considerably. Eurydice, the earliest work here and by far the longest, opens with something close to a snarl, full orchestra baring its teeth, and rarely relaxes from there. This is Lee in his tragic register, the cello (unnamed in the notes I have, alas) singing long Orphic lines against an orchestra that seems determined to swallow her whole. It is the least “Brazilian” thing in the set and arguably the most ambitious; thirty-two minutes of sustained dramatic tension is no small feat to pull off without a stage or a libretto to lean on. Not everything lands. Some of the climaxes feel over-engineered, arriving with a certain telegraphed inevitability. But the piece stays with you.

Persephone and the Four Seasons, its companion in mythology, is a much smaller box: seventeen minutes, oboe as protagonist, austerity as its language. I found myself wishing Lee had let a little more sunlight in. But then, Persephone spends half her year underground, and the music honors that arithmetic.

The Violin Concerto is, for my money, the best piece here, and Irina Muresanu plays it as though she has lived inside it for years. Sibelius hovers somewhere in the harmonic fog of the slow introduction; there are gestures that recall Prokofiev’s astringency and even a whiff of late Martinů’s rhapsodic sprawl, but Lee’s own voice, lyric and unguarded, comes through undiluted. The first movement in particular contains writing I’d put up against any American violin concerto of the past few decades: long-breathed, unhurried, content to let a melody simply be exquisite without apologizing for it. Muresanu’s tone through the upper register has an ecstatic quality that never tips into excess. This is playing of real conviction.

The Piano Concerto, subtitled Mozartiana, opens with a sly wink at Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, those same falling arpeggios, that same shadowed key, before Lee snatches the wheel and drives somewhere entirely his own. Robert Levin, who knows a thing or two about improvising in Mozart’s own idiom (his completions and cadenzas for the concertos are near-standard repertoire now), gets to improvise here too, and does so with evident delight. The finale swings back toward samba rhythm as if Lee simply couldn’t help himself. It’s a strange, likable piece, not fully Mozartian, not fully anything else, a hybrid that shouldn’t work and mostly does.

All six soloists play as though they believe every note of this, no small thing, given how easily this repertoire could be dismissed as pastiche or novelty. It isn’t. Lee has metabolized his influences rather than merely quoting them, and if the results are uneven across six works spanning fifteen years, the batting average is remarkably high. There is no direct rival album for any of this. Lee occupies a corner of American music largely his own, so comparison is moot. Recommended, especially for the Violin Concerto and the harp concerto’s slow movement, both of which I expect to return to.