Listen to this disc before reading the insert-notes. What you will see is an onslaught on the presumed contemporary music ‘establishment’ that makes Cornelius Cardew’s early 1970s Stockhausen polemic seem a model of reasoned argument. What you will hear is often rather more illuminating.
Michael Rosenzweig has been an intermittent presence on the new music scene for some two decades. Rehearing Song of the Universe confirms the impression this performance made back in 1985: of a coherent, well-integrated work, whose timbral and harmonic sophistication is not matched by a comparable grasp of the ‘long line’. The climactic unison statement (track 4, from 2'05'') does not feel the inevitable outcome of a dynamic process which Rosenzweig is at pains to point out. Despite their limitations, the remaining performances are never less than committed. Musically there are some arresting passages: the Octet’s flowering into sustained elegy (track 7, from 2'06''); the Fugue’s sonorous threnody, errupting into jagged chords just before the close; above all, the later stages of Earthsong (track 13), where a personal melodic strain at last comes into focus.
Make no mistake, Rosenzweig is a composer in earnest. If his work does not live up to his stated intentions, this is perhaps an inevitable consequence of defining oneself as a musical ‘outsider’. Hear this disc, however, and remember the many aspiring composers who will never reach even the level of exposure to which Rosenzweig feels himself condemned.Richard Whitehouse