Lost Souls
This past weekend the symphony gave the premiere performances of a piano concerto we commissioned, Lost Souls, by an Israeli composer named Avner Dorman. Before we announced our season I'd never heard of Dorman.
The piece began with the soloist absent from the piano. The strings began by playing a series of high, sustained harmonics with something that sounded like it could become a theme in the orchestral piano part being doubled by celeste. Then the lights began to dim. Then they got dimmer. Then they went out completely.
Now it's at this point that I immediately flashed back to our performance a nearly two years ago of Christopher Rouse's percussion concerto, Der Gerettete Alberich (which should have been subtitled Ein Stück Scheiße* but, unfortunately, that describes most of Rouse's music), where the soloist enters the stage dramatically representing Alberich from Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. I hate this kind of meaningless theatricality in contemporary music. If it serves the purpose of the music, fine; but if it doesn't then it's empty.
But back to the piece.
The soloist strikes his first notes and immediately the stage lights return to normal. It was at this point that I thought to myself that, with a little thought, I could have made 10 minutes of music out of that first 2 1/2.Ultimately, for the sake of giving the piece a chance, I decide to get over it. It's now at this point that I should probably give a little background into the work and its title, Lost Souls. Mr. Dorman (only 2 years my senior) told the audience that the inspiration for the piece actually came from the playing of his friend, Alon Goldstein, for whom the concerto was written and who was our soloist for the evening. He mentioned that Mr. Goldstein's playing seemed "from another time" when he was playing Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, etc. but very modern and edgy when he played more contemporary music. It was this idea, that of pianists and composers long gone hanging over and interacting with the composition as "ghosts" coupled with "edgy" and "modern" music combining with music of another time.
The piece was your basic fast-slow-fast format, was occasionally clangorous, occasionally wistful and largely unmemorable. How's that for a description? Forget it. The best way for me to describe the piece is to say that it sounded like the composer sat down and thought to himself, "You know, Leonard Bernstein never wrote a piano concerto. I wonder what that might sound like punched up with more "modern" harmonies and contemporary orchestration technique." And you can definitely tell that Dorman studied with John Corigliano, as you can tell every person who's ever studied with Corigliano. The only student that's ever transcended that is Elliot Goldenthal (but that's another post). The piece seemed to be short on melodic/motivic development or, for that matter, interconnectedness. The orchestral textures are oftentimes dense without any sense of clarity. It felt to me that his goal was to try to combine Old-World post tonal harmonies with the rhythmic drive of pop and rock music. I can totally get behind this. It's something like what Esa-Pekka Salonen does in his own music, only far more successfully because that "pop/rock" influence is heavily filtered and far more subtle (and even for all that harmonic and rhythmic complexity there's some sort of melodic idea that the listener can hang their ear on, even if it's not easily distinguished at first).
As I was driving home and thinking more about the piece I began to get really annoyed. I got annoyed because I could have written a piece that sounded like this**. You, dear reader, could have written this. Do you know why? Because it takes a lot of training (as most of you have) to write this music. It does not, however, require a great deal of imagination.
*A piece of shit
**To be clear: I have very little interest in writing music like this; music that's flashy, all surface features, and requires little or no thought on the part of the listener.


