Chamber Concerto/Ringing Changes

Charles Wuorinen - Chamber Concerto/Ringing Changes

released on LP in 1971

I'm glad that I am able to have a new post in what has been a few months.

Chamber Concerto

composed in 1963 for cello and 10 players

Fred Sherry - cello

The Group for Contemporary Music:

Harvey Sollberger - flute
Josef Marx - oboe and English horn
Jack Kreiselman - clarinet and bass clarinet
Donald MacCourt - bassoon
Jeanne Benjamin - violin
John Graham - viola
Alvin Brehm - double-bass
Robert Miller - piano
Raymond DesRoches, Richard Fitz, Claire Heldrich - percussion

Charles Wuorinen - conductor

The Cello Concerto was composed over the first six months of 1963 for the Group for Contemporary Music, which Harvey Sollberger and I had founded the previous spring. It was premiered in January of 1964 by the Group at Columbia University, with Robert Martin as soloist and Arthur Bloom conducting.
The external design of the work divides it into five connected movements, each of which casts the soloist in a different light. In the first, his role is conventionally bravura, and this is what separates him from his accompaniment. In the second (barring short interludes in which he does not participate), he plays the lead voice in a four-part canon; the other three voices are divided between the two groups of accompanying instruments, so that each group has only six pitch-classes in its vocabulary. The cello here is unique in its ability to utter all twelve. In the third movement, the soloist asserts himself by initiating events, which are then reflected elsewhere in the ensemble ... The fourth movement sees the cello as leader of a concertante group drawn from the larger ensemble, which varies in instrumentation at each appearance. Behind the relatively fast music of the soloist and his immediate friends is a slow-moving background ... The final movement offers a summary of all these solo-ensemble relations, for along with other transformations, it is a retrograde of the entire work, first at four times the original speed, then twice, then undiminished, and finally, for the very last notes, augmented.
The cello is accompanied by a divided ensemble, and occasionally you can hear the music localized in one group or the other; there is, however, no overt or consistent antiphony between the two. To the right as we face the cello are flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, violin, and viola; to the left are piano, contrabass, and percussion (in this recording divided among three players, rather than the two called for in the score). (Charles Wuorinen)

Ringing Changes

composed in 1969-1970 for percussion ensemble

The New Jersey Percussion Ensemble:

Raymond Des Roches - director

Joseph Passaro - vibraphone and timpani
Marty Martini, Louis Oddo - vibraphone
Dean Poulsen, Eugene McBride - piano
Ken Hosley, Donald Mari - drums
Matthew Patuto - brakedrums
Doreen Holmes - almglocken
Michael Moscariello - cymbals
Vincent Potuto, Jr. - tamtams
James Pugliese - string drum and chimes

Charles Wuorinen - conductor

Ringing Changes was composed in 1969 and '70 for the excellent ensemble of student percussionists founded and directed by Raymond DesRoches, the group that performs it here. The work is in a single long movement, and is - somewhat like the Concerto - based on a continuous polyphonic skeleton which lies beneath the sonic surface of the work, and which generates the moment-to-moment continuity. Here the music is divided between pitched and non-pitched voices, and a basic four-voice polyphony is disposed with two voices given to pitched instruments - mainly piano four-hands and vibraphones - and two ("noise" or relative-pitch) given with various alternations and duplications to sets of 12 metal instruments, 12 drums, 6 cymbals, and 4 tamtams. An occasional inflectional role is performed by a string drum, and at the end chimes and timpani appear.  (Charles Wuorinen)

Tracklisting:

Side One

1. Chamber Concerto  {18:05}

Side Two

1. Ringing Changes  {16:50}

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