A Wildly Inventive Piece By American Composer Christopher Rouse
I've been listening to a CD of music by the prominent American composer Christopher Rouse (1949 -) , who currently teaches at the Juilliard school and is one of America's most widely performed living composers, and quite deservedly .
Rouse has written a wide variety of works , symphonies , concertos for flute, clarinet , violin ,oboe, cello and even trombone , miscellaneous orchestral works , chamber music etc. His music is not forbiddingly austere and avant-garde , but neither does it pander to audiences with "easy listening ". It mixes harsh dissonance with warm, neo-romantic lyricism .
The CD in question combines Rouse's violin concerto with his outrageous fantasy on Wagner themes for orchestra and percussion soloist called "Der Gerettete Alberich " (Alberich saved.) In Wagner's great tetralogy the Ring of the Nibelungen , Alberich , the greedy , power-hungry dwarf who curses the Ring which grants its owner supreme power over the world , seems to be the only main character still alive at the cataclysmic conclusion of the Ring , where his arch-enemy Wotan and the other Gods are destroyed by the curse .
Rouse wondered what happens to the evil dwarf after the terrible end of the Ring when he wrote the piece . The work opens with a direct quote from the very end of the tetralogy , and then begins to play with a variety of themes from the Ring ; the baleful motif of the curse , and other memorable melodies .
The soloist plays a wide variety of percussion instruments, including gourds , a Jamaican steel drum , and has a ball ! The orchestra plays with the motifs and transmogrifies them sometimes by switching into atonality . To quote from Saturday Night Live , it's a wild and crazy composition ! In the final section , the Wagnerian motifs coalesce into a halftime style march from a football game !
Der Gerettete Alberich was written for the brilliant but hearing-impaired Scottish percussion virtuoso Evelyn Glennie , who has been profiled on CBS for 60 minutes . She recorded the work for Ondine records with Leif Segerstam and the Helsinki Philharmonic , and this is the CD I've been listening to . This work has been performed with considerable success by leading orchestras all over America and Europe , and is music for people who think they hate modern music . I think you'll have great fun listening to it.