"There are no two points so distant from one another that they cannot be connected by a single straight line -- and an infinite number of curves."
Composer Lawrence Dillon has produced an extensive body of work, from brief solo pieces to a full-length opera. Three disks of his music are due out in 2010 on the Bridge, Albany and Naxos labels. In the past year, he has had commissions from the Emerson String Quartet, the Cassatt String Quartet, the Mansfield Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, the Salt Lake City Symphony, the Ravinia Festival, the Daedalus String Quartet, the Kenan Institute for the Arts, the University of Utah and the Idyllwild Symphony Orchestra.
Although he lost 50% of his hearing in a childhood illness, Dillon began composing as soon as he started piano lessons at the age of seven. In 1985, he became the youngest composer to earn a doctorate at The Juilliard School, and was shortly thereafter appointed to the Juilliard faculty. Dillon is now Composer in Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he has served as Music Director of the Contemporary Ensemble, Assistant Dean of Performance, and Interim Dean of the School of Music. He was the Featured American Composer in the February 2006 issue of Chamber Music magazine.
We had the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio here Saturday night playing, among other things, a piece written for them by Arvo Pärt entitled Mozart – Adagio, billed by the composer as a “commentary” on the slow movement from Mozart’s F Major Piano Sonata, K. 280. Pärt extracted some of the dissonances from Mozart’s composition and used them as framing devices for the original work. In effect, 90% of what you heard was what Mozart wrote, with a few interpolations, (using a word I hate, but it fits here) decontextualized.
I was eager to hear the result, because my experience with Pärt is two-sided, with very little in between: I find his works either intensely moving or sadly empty – which I suppose is the risk he takes in striving for utter simplicity. When it doesn’t work, there’s not much there to care about.
For me, this was a piece that fell squarely on the wrong side of the tracks. It was decomposed Mozart, except that description makes it sound a lot more interesting than it was.
The original version of Pärt’s “commentary” dates from 1992, although he’s been revising it continually ever since, even giving the musicians some new adjustments this past week. And therein lies a sad irony – 13 years spent futilely attempting to adorn a piece Mozart probably wrote between lunch and supper.
Disclaimer: I’ve written my own commentary piece on Mozart, which is called Amadeus ex machina, a distillation of the 40th symphony into a 10-minute soundbyte. You can hear an excerpt here (sorry I don’t have a soundfile of the entire piece).
So it would perfectly logical for you to conclude that I can’t hear the value of Pårt’s commentary because I’m too close to my own, which is significantly different in character and purpose.
But when you factor in Pärt’s disinclination to write a piano trio in the first place, the fact that he composed the piece more or less unwillingly, and has spent much of the ensuing years trying to rework it to his satisfaction -- I think there’s good reason to believe that he’s not particularly enthused by the results either.
posted by Lawrence Dillon
6:42 AM
