LIEBERSON Drala, Fire, Concerto for Four Groups of Instruments
There is a moment, maybe ninety seconds into Drala, when the strings part like fog off the Charles and something like a chorale emerges underneath — not quite tonal, not quite anything you could name, but unmistakably vocal in its intent, as though the orchestra had briefly grown a throat. I have heard this piece perhaps two dozen times now, in concert and out, and that moment still catches me by surprise.
Peter Lieberson came up through the most unforgiving corridors of American modernism: Wuorinen, Babbitt, the whole serialist apparatus that in the 1960s and ‘70s could feel less like a compositional language than a loyalty oath. You can hear the rigor in the earliest piece here, the Concerto for Four Groups of Instruments, which dates from 1972 and sounds it — astringent, pointillist, notes flung out like iron filings around a magnet whose shape you have to infer. It is not an unpleasant piece. It is, frankly, a young man’s piece, brilliant and a little cold, the sound of someone proving he can do the hardest thing before he allows himself to do the truest thing.
What happened next is the real story, and Deutsche Grammophon’s annotators, this being part of the 20/21 series, tell it plainly enough. Lieberson found Tibetan Buddhism. Chögyam Trungpa, Naropa, the whole Colorado ferment of the 1970s that also touched Ginsberg and Glass and any number of West Coast seekers. It would be easy to dismiss this as biography irrelevant to the notes on the page. It is not irrelevant. You can hear a mind slowly permitting itself warmth.
By the time of Drala, 1986, a Seiji Ozawa commission, the transformation is complete. The piece takes its shape from a sadhana, a Buddhist visualization practice, and its four movements run together without pause, an unbroken arc rather than a sequence of contrasts. The opening “Invocation” is the famous stretch, the one Oliver Knussen called perhaps the most luminous passage in the last century’s music. I’d want to argue with that over dinner and a bottle of wine — I can think of pages in Ligeti, in late Britten, in Takemitsu’s A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden, that stake similar claims. But argue is the operative word. Knussen isn’t wrong so much as he’s picked a fight worth having.
The chords that anchor that opening — spaced, luminous, faintly bell-like in the way they hang in the orchestral air rather than resolve — recur throughout the piece in altered guises, sometimes fragmented, sometimes thickened almost to the point of dissonant density before the texture thins again. Knussen’s own fingerprints are all over the interpretive tradition here, incidentally; the kinship between his sound-world and Lieberson’s runs both ways, two composers listening hard to each other across a friendship that shaped both.
Fire, the other orchestral work, is a different animal entirely: four minutes of barely contained combustion, originally meant as a New York Philharmonic fanfare before Lieberson, by his own account, found the assignment uninspiring and wrote something stranger and better instead. It’s the surviving fragment of an abandoned cycle, The Five Great Elements, and one feels the loss of the other four instalments once this one ends. A calm, hushed centre section sits at the middle of it, surrounded by writing so virtuosic for every section of the orchestra that it plays like a compressed concerto for orchestra.
The chamber works reward patience differently. “Accordance” and “Free and Easy Wanderer” work through what Lieberson called harmonic stations — places visited, left, and returned to changed. Ziji, the word means something like brilliant confidence, is looser still, intuitive in construction, its material spinning outward from a single opening gesture with an almost improvisatory nerve. Raising the Gaze takes its cue, oddly enough, from medieval dance tunes heard on the radio, filtered through a meditation term for the moment attention lifts from the internal to the external. The percussion writing here is bright, insistent, occasionally a little manic in the best sense.
The “Three Songs” of 1981, setting poems by Douglas Penick, later Lieberson’s librettist for King Gesar and Ashoka’s Dream, are the disc’s most intimate offering, and Rosemary Hardy sings them with a cool, unforced clarity that suits their nocturnal strangeness. “Listen and Hear,” the first, is the standout: spare, almost whispered, a small piece that lingers longer than its length has any right to.
Performances throughout are exceptional, idiomatic, unhurried where unhurried is called for, alert to the music’s peculiar stillness-within
