Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Leo Ornstein�s Piano Quintet - Up Close and Personal

I've been wanting to hear this smashing piece live for years, ever since hearing the New World CD featuring Janice Weber on piano, an experience that changed my musical life forever. When I heard that Weber was doing it with the Ives Quartet at three concerts in the Bay Area in late January, I decided to fly out there from Philadelphia for the occasion. It turned out to be even a little more exciting than I had anticipated.

Leo Ornstein (1893-2002), of course, was the enfant terrible of the nineteen-teens decade, with his piano music that combined full-fisted cluster technique with a Rachmaninovian sensibility well before the emergence of Henry Cowell and before anyone had heard what Charles Ives was doing. The notoriety of pieces like Wild Man's Dance and Suicide in an Airplane (based on a true story involving a biplane - of course now it always needs a disclaimer) brought people to his concerts, where they also heard the first United States performances of Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Scriabin and Bart�k, among others. As you can read in Carol Oja's Making Music Modern and in a forthcoming full-length biography of Ornstein, Leo was the poster-child for the most radical new music of the era.

His Op.31 Violin Sonata represented, in his mind, the farthest he could go, �beyond which lay madness.� In the late teens and early 1920s, his white-hot musical style gradually cooled down, rather like a liquid mixture begins to clarify as its various components separate out. But the star metaphor is also apt: as a supernova cools, it is compacted to an extremely high density. The harmonic language of his 1927 Piano Quintet is almost black-hole dense. Imagine The Rite of Spring compressed into five instruments. Most harmony starts with simple chords and adds notes to color the harmony. In this piece, though you can analyze it that way, it seems like Ornstein started with the total chromatic and selectively removed pitches to create harmonic fields that govern the work. It is dense, but also tense ... and immense. The tension barely lets up through three movements and nearly 40 minutes. And the fast music is incredibly fast. The score is 252 pages long!

Which brings me to my close-up. Although I went as a listener, I ended up being Janice Weber�s page-turner at two of the concerts. This piece is the ultimate workout for a page-turner because some of them go by in as little as two seconds. You don�t sit down. And you have to know the piece well, because the tempo changes frequently and the rhythms are additive and syncopated. The piano writing is Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Cowell combined on up to four staves. (Or, alternatively, a mash-up of the Bart�k First and Second Piano Concertos.) The pianist is silent for only four bars in the first movement, six in the second and one in the third.

Janice Weber�s performance, on the CD and in these concerts, is one of the best matches of pianist to piece that I�ve ever heard, or heard about. She can do loud without harshness, sweep and schwung without sloppiness, softness to silence, and bravura to perfection. And being just two feet away from her hands, I can testify to it better than any critic who has ever written about a pianist�s performance from the audience. It was all I could do to keep myself standing still up there.

The Ives Quartet was fantastic�in the Ornstein as well as in the Beethoven third Rasumovsky Quartet that preceded it (!) on the program. (The fugal finale was taken at warp speed with complete accuracy and unity and a surprising expressive range for notes going by at perhaps 10 per second.) Ornstein�s string writing in the Quintet is frequently in rhythmic unison against the piano, and other times heterophonically diverse. The Ives were laser-coherent, able to cut through the diamond-dense piano writing with utter precision. And they also captured the very Hebraic character of the slower melodies that surface throughout the work. (Funny, they didn�t look Jewish.) I wish their Saturday performance had been recorded�it was every bit as good as the superlative CD performance with Weber and the Lydian Quartet.

This piece should be done in LA and New York (and dare I hope Philadelphia?) as soon as possible. The Ives is based in Silicon Valley and the Lydian in Boston. In the meanwhile, by all means hear it on the CD. Fasten your seat belts first, and take a deep breath. It�s a wild ride.

Postscript: The composer�s son, Severo, took early retirement from his job as one of the creators of the technology that led to the PC and the Internet (my wording, not his) to edit his father�s works and typeset them on a computer. As a result, almost everything Leo wrote except the orchestral music is available on line in PDF format (scores and parts), downloadable for free at http://www.otherminds.org/ornstein/list_of_works.htm.

Ornstein died in 2002 at age 108 or 109. His later music, almost all for piano, is stylistically diverse, moving comfortably between tonality and otherwise, held together by the supreme force of a creative intellect and shaped by two hands on a keyboard. (The Tarantelle is sonorously barbarous, but A Morning in the Woods is like Keith Jarrett�s most lyrical work.) His last work, the 30-minute Piano Sonata No. 8, was composed when he was 98 years old. It is recorded by Marc-Andr� Hamelin on Hyperion as part of an all-Ornstein CD that overlaps very little with Janice Weber�s all-Ornstein CD on Naxos. Both are eminently worth having.

posted by Eric J. Bruskin 1/31/2006