This is the third disc in Argo’s series devoted to the music of the American composer Aaron Jay Kernis and if you liked its predecessors (6/93 and 11/96) you’ll find plenty to admire here. The venue has changed – Hugh Wolff directs the CBSO following live performances at Symphony Hall – but otherwise there are no real surprises. Once again the composer proves himself a fine craftsman of profoundly unoriginal music, seeing it as his function to provide instead a dazzling patchwork of secondhand gestures and textures. The Second Symphony is brilliantly coloured and instantly evocative in the manner of the best film music, albeit with little in the way of sustained development and yet another characteristically portentous programme. Where Colored Field, Kernis’s concerto for cor anglais and orchestra, was advertised as a response to a visit to the Nazi death camps, this time we are invited to ponder such issues as “the endless violence of the Gulf War, the subtle and unsubtle encroachment upon women’s and minority rights, the hovering threat of censorship of artists along with the economic, social and medical disasters that plague us daily”. The movements are entitled “Alarm”, “Air/Ground” and “Barricade”. The first is raucous, much of it a noisy, ostinato-driven rant. In the second, simple, consolatory melodies turn soft and soupy over archetypal, late-romantic-cum-VW harmonies. While writing the third, Kernis says “a recurring image was the building full of innocent Iraqi civilians under siege which was mistakenly bombed and obliterated”; the tam-tam thwacks at the close will certainly test the limits of your system. This is a great piece for hi-fi enthusiasts, and the CBSO sound happy enough apart from some less than unanimous strings in exposed passages. Its problem is that unlike a potential post-modern classic like John Adams’s El Dorado, it does not in my experience improve with repetition; the initial impact is all.
Kernis writes predictably well for the strings in his expanded string orchestra version of the Musica Celestis, although he strains credibility at times with his insistence on extremes of pitch – possibly designed to disguise the music’s more obvious stylistic debts. Even here, the virginal Ivesian quality threatens to curdle into something too stickily sweet and it is typical that the composer should have felt it necessary to drop the name of Hildegard of Bingen. The orchestration is the most memorable part of Invisible Mosaic III, one of several Kernis works ostensibly inspired by the Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna but coming across as accomplished science fiction film music intercut with chunks of ‘aspirational’ Sibelius. Anyone who remembers Alien and that film’s brazen appropriation of Howard Hanson’s Second Symphony will find the parallels too close for comfort here. And surely Kernis’s extended E flat peroration is self-defeatingly over the top. We climb into the John Williams spaceship and take off – what other explanation can there be?
As I reported last time, Kernis himself has said that he regards ‘the vision’ as more important than the specificity of the musical language through which it finds expression – but this is going too far. Perhaps you won’t agree, and technically speaking this Argo disc reflects the high standards of the label’s American music series. Even the naive enthusiasm of the booklet-notes is not inappropriate: “An encyclopaedia of musical development, the work [Invisible Mosaic III] exemplifies great compositional skill at virtually every turn of phrase” (Scott Griffin). If that is your kind of commentary this could be your kind of CD. At the very least, Kernis has a quite extraordinary ear for orchestral sonority.'