Meditation And Overtones

$18.99
Label
Cambria
Release Date
May 25, 2010
Format
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MEDITATIONS AND OVERTONES • Margaret Mills (pn) • CAMBRIA 1195 (54:01)


FEIGIN 4 Meditations on Dogen. Variations on Empty Space. SCHONTHAL Sonata Breve. BEACH 5 Improvisations. COATES Sonata No. 1, “Tones in Overtones”


Ruth Schonthal’s String Quartet No. 3, “In Memoriam Holocaust,” showed up on Volume 40 of the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music on Naxos. It was reviewed in Fanfare 29:5. The three works by which she is represented on this disc are of an earlier making; Gestures dates from 1978, Canticles from 1987, and Self-Portrait from 1991. Before going on, I should mention that the recording at hand is not new; it was recorded in 1993. Surely, it must have been released before now, but if so, it was not sent for review and therefore did not find its way into the Fanfare Archive.


Pianist Margaret Mills has established herself as a specialist in the music of Ruth Schonthal, Lowell Liebermann, Miriam Gideon, Elizabeth Lauer, Richard Wilson, and Anthony Newman. A graduate of Vassar College, Mills furthered her studies in Freiburg, Germany, before returning to the U.S. to take her master’s at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music. Her teachers have included Claude Frank, Eugene List, and Jerome Lowenthal. In 1974, she made her Carnegie Hall debut, and in 1981, her first appearance in London’s Wigmore Hall. Mills has enjoyed a long relationship with the Third Street Music School Settlement in New York City as a teacher and administrator. She is currently manager of the Artist Performance Series, which presents weekly faculty concerts during the school year. Mills is a member of the Board of Visitors of the New England Conservatory of Music and a member of the International Alliance of Women in Music.


Schonthal’s Canticles was written for Mills. The piece takes its inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights . Though banded on a single track, Canticles is easily broken down into a tripartite work, with each section representing a panel in the artist’s cartoon. Its message: Too much pleasuring thyself in the here and now leads to really bad times on the other side. Schonthal employs a motive based on sequentially ascending fourths, which she uses throughout to create an atmosphere of the chaotic cauldron of the Creation (first panel), the pleasures of worldly delights (second panel), and the dissonant tortures of Hell (third panel). Even without this précis as a guide, one can hear the piece in the abstract, which at many points struck me as having certain technical devices and a soundscape somewhat similar to both Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit and Copland’s Piano Variations.


Gestures is essentially a sequence of 11 short etudes. Each lasts an average of about 45 seconds. Webern comes to mind, though the style isn’t really Webernesque. The pieces are quite varied in tempo, texture, and harmonic/contrapuntal treatment, with some being sharply dissonant, while others are almost lyrical and conventional in their harmonic settings. According to the composer’s note, the set is arranged in a “somewhat cyclical fashion,” but she does not elaborate on the form it takes.


Unofficially, Schonthal expanded on the title of her Self-Portrait , referring to the piece as a “Self Portrait of the Artist as an Older Woman.” The work came about in response to a letter Schonthal received from a German pianist and admirer seeking more information about the composer’s music and biographical details of her life. Reflecting on the letter writer’s questions, Schonthal wrote Self-Portrait as a kind of nostalgic looking back and summing up of her life’s work up to that point, the age of 67. Far from being done, however, Schonthal continued to compose as late as a year or two before her death in 2006 at the age of 82.


Lowell Liebermann (b.1961) is what you might call a pedigreed East Coast establishment composer, having been groomed at Juilliard under the care of two American East Coasters with impeccable credentials, David Diamond and Vincent Persichetti. Liebermann has enjoyed a good deal of commercial success with works like his flute concerto, flute sonata, and Gargoyles for piano, mainly because he writes with ears on the listener and eyes on the box office.


Liebermann’s Piano Sonata No. 1 is a piece of juvenilia, written in 1977 when the composer was 15. Its four movements are compressed into just less than 10 minutes. A boy Mozart Liebermann was not, but the piece exhibits a sound grasp of keyboard and compositional technique, with a particularly delightful Scherzo that lasts just over a minute.


At less than 14 minutes, the Sonata No. 2, subtitled “Notturna,” isn’t that much longer for having been written in 1983. It was dedicated to well-known pianist Stephen Hough, who premiered it in 1983 at the Wavendon Festival in England. In Liebermann’s own words, “The work’s relentless austerity and sustained mood make any further explication of the subtitle unnecessary.”


Ordinarily, neither the Schonthal nor the Liebermann would be my type of music, but Margaret Mills quickly won me over with probing performances of these scores. Having made a specialty of interpreting and playing the works of these composers, her readings go way beyond note-perfect execution. It’s clear from the outset that her immersion in these pieces breathes real life into them, making a convert even of me. Her touch, pure silver and soft velvet one moment, can change in a heartbeat to fire and brimstone the next, always finding just the right tone of voice and way of phrasing and sustaining a line that turns a measure magical. Listen, for example, to the Lento of Lieberman’s Sonata No. 1, or to the segment of Schonthal’s Canticles beginning at 4:47, for a mesmerizing experience.


I can honestly say that Margaret Mills defied my expectations and, for that, and for enabling me to appreciate the beauties of music I would not have previously thought beautiful, I thank her and strongly urge you to acquire this CD.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins


Product Description:

  • Release Date: May 25, 2010


  • UPC: 021475011957


  • Catalog Number: CD1195


  • Label: Cambria


  • Number of Discs: 1


  • Composer: Feigin, Schonthal, Beach, Coat


  • Performer: Margaret Mills