This is a mind-stretching follow-up to the fine disc of Babbitt's solo piano music issued in the UK some 18 months ago (Harmonia Mundi HMC5160, 5/86; CD HMC90 5160). Here are two recent large-scale works, elaborate enough to challenge even the most complacently sophisticated ear. With no scores available, I can claim to do no more in this initial review than outline an immediate response to performances which sound exemplary in their dedication and command, though the recording, especially of the Concerto, brings one close to the players when a greater degree of detachment might be preferable.
In both works the predominant impression is of volatile atoms of material tamed and moulded by a mind, and an aural imagination, to which total integration is the only valid source of both beauty and memorability—the twin ideals of any serious creative artist. In the Concerto there are clear distinctions between sections which emphasize particular registers and tone-colours: there are also strongly characterized contrasts between te sustaining orchestra and the capricious, skittering piano. Yet these diverse elements are never allowed to promote more fundamental contrasts of material or even (it would appear) of tempo. Similarly, the fifteen 15-line stanzas of John Hollander's intricate poem The Head of the Bed follow one another with maximum swiftness, as if to obviate the risk of establishing clear subdivisions, and the variety of accompanimental colours and textures remains subordinate to the driving force of the composer's single-minded pursuit of unity.
Hollander's disarmingly prosaic title conceals a concern with dreams, with fantasy, and Babbitt's music matches this obsessive quality with intense, unremitting inventiveness. His subordination of contrasts to continuity may even strike you as a kind of inside-out minimalism. But there is an urgency, even a flamboyance in the way the music pursues its own highly-integrated processes that prevents the result sounding merely forbidding. This is the language of a composer to be reckoned with.'