I. Maestoso
II. Spiritoso
III. Cadenza—Delicato

Shapey's first Evocation, written in 1959, was for violin, piano, and percussion; this second, with cello in place of violin, came twenty years later to a commission from Joel Krosnick, one of the composer's most adamant supporters. Krosnick duly gave the first performance, with Gilbert Kalish and Gordon Gottlieb, in New York on April 14, 1981. There were two more in the series: No.3 for viola and piano (1982), and No.4 for violin, cello, piano, and percussion (1994).

It is hard to say what is being evoked in the present piece, the music is so much about statement—statement and altered restatement. "As in all of my music," to quote the composer's own note, "it is a one-fabric work. The materials derived from the initial statements go through many metamorphoses."

Within the first minute or so, for instance, the opening four measures for piano and cello have been condensed into a cadenza for solo cello, marked "rubato-bravura" (an emphatic, four-note motif at the bottom of the keyboard, for instance, is imitated by the cello an octave higher), and the piano measure that follows has been repeated rhythmically on timpani. Elements from this passage—also remarkable for featuring the extra-low A to which the cello's bottom string is retuned—will recur again in this movement, and in the finale.

Interleaved with such vigorously mutable material in the first movement, however, are three sections of a more static character, where the piano keeps repeating a figure in chords—often with rhythmic alteration, so that the music is at once fixed and pliable. The percussion part is different each time: a slow melody on glockenspiel, an ostinato on unpitched instruments (tam tam, cymbals, bass drum), and a xylophone process like the piano's. Meanwhile, the cello plays the same sequence of notes on each occasion, but with the rhythm changed. In structure and harmony, this music recalls Messiaen.

What results is an ABABAB form, where the "A" music is strenuous and the "B" music essentially changeless. Simple alternation, though, is not Shapey's way. The music is full of contrast and abrasion, its energy continuous. Much longer than the previous two, the third "A" section has something of the feeling of a development.

Next comes a long dance-song for the cello, in its standard tuning, overlaid with piano-percussion ostinatos. Part way through, this movement drops to half speed.

The finale opens with the cello alone, its bass A restored, reflecting on the first movement's "A" material. More aspects of the opening movement are then reviewed, at extremes of slowness and quietude, as if under ice.

"I hate long, involved explanations, which in the end become excuses for the music," Shapey wrote. "I guess my motto is: ‘Play it again, Sam.' That is the only explanation that means anything."

Gérard Pesson (b. 1958)
Mes Béatitudes

Refrain—Pantoum—Refrain—Barcarolle (E flat)—Refrain—Doux Chant des morts (Stifter/Bruckner)—Refrain—Abgesang 1—Refrain (nail and wood)—Abgesang 2

Gérard Pesson studied at the Sorbonne and at the Paris Conservatoire, where he now teaches. His piano quartet Mes Béatitudes (1994) seems to be characteristic of him in being as powerful as it is fragile, as solid as it is unstable, as captivating as it is perplexing. It has been recorded twice, by the Ensemble Recherche on an all-Pesson release (Aeon AECD 0106) and by the Ensemble Alternance (Stradivarius STR 33542).

Playing continuously for about fifteen minutes, the piece has one recurrent section—or perhaps rather one recurrent state—and five that appear just once. The refrain, to quote the composer's own note, "is at once a fragment and a beginning. It is an arrested development." Skidding in the high register, it is music that makes its whispers shouts.

The pantoum is a Malayan verse form adapted by Baudelaire and, musically, by Ravel in his Piano Trio. Pesson's "is all skin and bones—the thrill without the flesh." Another historical form, the barcarolle, also seems to be appearing in skeletal form, as a sequence of E flat major chords in the piano, subtly colored with other notes.

In the "Doux Chant des morts" (Sweet Song of the Dead), Pesson quotes the second theme from the slow movement of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony ("one of the most beautiful themes ever written") and remembers also the novelist he sees as Bruckner's literary parallel, Adalbert Stifter. Of the quotation, Pesson remarks: "I would hope it might seem almost independent, like a surtitle, an intertext. It is presented that way, a bit like a commercial break in my little narration."

An "Abgesang" is a coda. Pesson provides two, quoting Adorno: "two detours that are perhaps the direct route." The first has a slow heartbeat; the second is a quick finish.

Harrison Birtwistle (b. 1934)
Lied

This seven-minute piece was commissioned by the Ruhr Piano Festival to mark Alfred Brendel's seventy-fifth birthday, and was first performed by his son Adrian with the pianist Till Fellner in Wuppertal on August 9, 2006. The two instruments converse, within what the piano's sustained chords make sound like a vaulted space. Eventually the cello sings, as the title promised, and sings again—but the piano maintains its own voice, to interject as well as support. The work carries an epigraph from Rilke's "Liebes-Lied" (Love Song):

What is the instrument on which we're strung?
And who's the fiddler has us in his hand?

Another distinguished pianist had a hand in this larger work of 2000: Emanuel Ax, who commissioned it, and gave the first performance with Evelyn Glennie, in Chicago on March 22, 2001. There is a recording by Nicolas Hodges and Claire Edwardes (Metronome MET 1074).

The title is a nice homage to the musician who instigated this big piece, which plays continuously for over twenty minutes, but the work is a manual also in being, as the composer has described it, "a compendium of rhythmic techniques." It requires, too, a good deal of manual dexterity from both performers, who must, so to speak, have the chops.

Birtwistle's "rhythmic techniques" are not altogether unlike Shapey's, for again matters of repetition and varied repetition are to the fore. Repetition here seems to give rise to change. Jolts to the system become systems of their own; patterns grow and degenerate as new ones are born.

The presence of two players helps this along. The percussion instrumentation is chosen so as to be close to the piano in certain respects yet decidedly different. At the start, the percussionist is centered on the marimba, eventually with some momentous interventions from drums. Then comes a shift to the largely unpitched struck-wood sounds of woodblocks and templeblocks, after which the vibraphone dominates for a while before the marimba comes back into pre-eminence, until near the dramatic end. The relationship between the two performers can be one of concurrence (rare), interdependence, or virtually total independence, and Birtwistle moves with agility among these possibilities. It may seem at times, too, that one of the players is signalling to the other.

Unusually for Birtwistle, the work opens with a stretch of over a hundred measures with the same time signature, 4/8, and an unvarying fast tempo. (Such conditions will recur toward the end.) The stage is set for pulsating excitement, of which this work contains a great deal. Aspects of contest, of game, are certainly not absent.

The competitors can, however, also join together in extraordinary feats of mutually observant virtuosity and in exquisite moments of calm.

Program note © Paul Griffiths

Born in Wales, Paul Griffiths has written books on music, novels and librettos.  Among the first are The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and The Substance of Things Heard, a selection from the reviews and essays he produced during more than thirty years as a music critic in London and New York.