Reviews
An ebullient personality
"...fertile imagination and bright spirit.
In January this year the New York born composer Elliott Schwartz was 69. He has spent his working life at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine where he now holds the Robert K Beckwith professorship. But his distinction as both composer and academic has taken him to several other US campuses and brought him to England where his ebullient personality won him admirers at Cambridge University and in London at Trinity College and, where I last met him many years ago, at the Guildhall School of Music. That ebullience runs through his music too.
This CD brings together five substantial pieces, three of which have been written over the last four years and show no diminution of his fertile imagination and bright spirit. The title piece, Voyager, was completed in 2002 and, as is implied, is associated with journeys -- to the Netherlands, England, Japan and Iceland. In his characteristic way, Schwartz incorporates fragments of older music on his travels -- traditional melodies, and brief quotations from pieces by composers from those countries as far distant in time as Sweelinck and Josquin, to closer giants like Vaughan Williams, whose symphonies were the subject of his 1964 book (published by Amherst). From its stirring opening, Voyager glides over musical territories, rising and falling as if airborne, an impressive piece of orchestral writing.
Mehitabel's Serenade (2001) is a concertante work for alto saxophone and orchestra (the agile soloist is Kenneth Radnofsky for whom the piece was written) and this is another work that travels through many moods with again one of the Schwartz trademarks -- the climactic build.
The short piece Jack O'Lantern was written in 2000 for the Cleveland Chamber Orchestra to celebrate Halloween, and is representative of the Schwartz wit, starting and ending in darkness to leave Jack grinning across the rear stage wall.
There are two slightly older pieces: Celebrations/Reflections: A Time Warp for orchestra, written in 1985 to celebrate his own 50th birthday and 25th wedding anniversary, again uses fragments of past pieces as well as a Victorian parlour song; and Timepiece 1794 for chamber orchestra, a suite of three pieces written in 1994 to celebrate Bowdoin College's bicentennial and using fragments from music of 200 years ago in a collage of wit and ingenuity."
—Patric Standford (Music and Vision,UK), 2005
"In most of the works here he's obsessed with quoting existing musical material imaginatively rescored, with a sense of allusive fun partly derived from Ives... Showing Schwartz's developed sense of theatre, Timepiece 1794...revels in exhilarating stylistic shifts... This is an intriguing portrait of an American original."
—Peter Dickinson (The Gramophone, UK), 2004
"Given the composer's penchant for theatrical and sometimes visual effects...a DVD might be an appropriate medium for Schwartz's work. Classical MTV, anyone?"
—Christopher Hyde (Maine Sunday Telegram), 2004
"'Voyager' is clearly the standout here...This and the rest of his music reflect Schwartz's Ivesian bent, his propensity for quotation, and the soggetto cavato initial carving in music that finds Schwartz whittling his own name in a symphony like he would his sweetheart's in a tree trunk..."
—Mark Scearce (The Phoenix), 2004
"This is a most attractive disc. Unlike much modern music, in which one is made uncomfortably aware of the compositional mechanisms involved, Schwartz has an unusual ability to write accessible, tonal music while deriving his materials sometimes mathematically or through the use of serial techniques... [The results]... are integrated into works of such delightful richness of texture amd harmonic invention that one is not really aware of this at all, hearing instead warmly Romantic music with direct appeal to the senses and emotions... One comes away from the whole with the impression of serious and expertly written works by a composer who doesn't take himself too seriously, (and) who has a light, humorous touch alongside his seriousness of purpose...."
—International Record Guide, 2004
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