David Del Tredici Monsters

• Mar 27, 2019

Two new works by David Del Tredici
Wenesday, March 27, 2019
7PM @ Casa Italiana, Columbia University, New York

Pianists Eric Moe and Robert Frankenberry

1. Matrimony
2. Scylla and Charybdis

The first was a quodlibet of the two wedding marches by Felix and Richard. It was played with precision and conviction by Eric Moe.

David Del Tredici’s second string quartet is a mind blowing phenomenon. It is the best I've heard of his recent chamber music. It is not a whimsical piece.

His quodlibet pieces are light. They include the piece he wrote for Cygnus in which, at a climactic movement, the Last Rose of Summer is presented with The Star-Spangled Banner. That piece is over the top hilarious, entertaining, and outrageous, (that’s what Tiggers do) with David’s nephew Felix moaning on the trombone. Eric Moe’s piece Matrimony was delivered with a delicacy and subtlety and his peddling was very discreet, almost chaste. I liked that. It steered us away from taking the piece as a mere novelty. It is not that.

There’s more to be said about Del Tredici’s best works. Matrimony is way up there, I think. He never merely screws around with the 8-note scale. . He is a master of creating long stretches of music that are characterized by a very distinct, fetching, and not at all simple sound—a harmony that is a collision of voices in counterpoint. That is a huge achievement.

And moreover, if one feels that integration is what we should be doing now, as I do, the final step is the most difficult--integrating functional harmony with post-tonal things that we can't give up (and why should we?). That is the shark tank that Del Tredici has plunged into. I don't think it's unfair to say that he is subjecting his music to the criticism that Shoenberg had of Reger and Busoni and other fiercly chromatic tonal music. I am a Schoenberg fan and a Del Tredici fan in a time when Schoenberg is out of favor. Embracing Del Tredici is part of the process of qualifying our celebration of Schoenberg. His answer to Reger brought its own problems that are still playing out.

The second piece on the program was written for Rod Frankenberry who played piano and sang and narrated a story about Scylla & Charibdis. Del Tredici wrote the text. Scylla is described in a manner that immediately brings to mind the vagina dentata of lore. I commented on that afterwards and David Del Tredici said he’d never heard of that.

This reminds me of when we were talking about what he would do for Cygnus I asked if he was familiar with Beckford's Vatek. I said he'd never heard of that. I tried to sell it to him as something interesting and bizzarre--exotic, and with a bit of homoeroticism. I suggested that because I wanted to the steer him away from the famous but controversial Rumi poem about gourding. He wanted to make a setting of that poem for Cygnus. I needed Cygnus and Courtney Budd to be comfortable with the concept. It was voted down. David said Vatuk wasn’t over-the-top enough for him and after many more months of thinking he would never get around to his Cygnus piece, he called me, very fired up about The Last Rose of Summer. Matrimony puts The Last Rose into a familial relationship. The two works build upon one another, become bigger than either one individually.

The performance by Rod Frankenberry was wetter that Moe's, not at all chaste. That was right for Del Tredici's story. And Frankenberry's narration matched his boisterous playing. It was arch, like the story. The performance was a tour de force. Del Tredici's scary and voluptuous Scylla is strongly reminiscent of the Aubrey Beardsley story, which he richly illustrated, The Hill. There is described a pastoral landscape that is like a woman’s torso—two ridges forming a Y with a ravine and a waterfall in between, a prose version of Courbet's L'Origine du monde, but in geographical form. [ The most memorable part, however, is when Venus pleasures the unicorn. ]