New York-based Continuum ensemble is a first-class chamber organization under the direction of Joel Sachs and Cheryl Seltzer, winning considerable acclaim for its challenging and original approach to programming contemporary music. Continuum ensemble's relationship with the music of
Henry Cowell goes back to their third season as a performing unit, and they have periodically revived and refined their interpretations of his chamber works, presenting them all over the world. Cowell: Instrumental, Chamber and Vocal Music 1 was recorded for Musical Heritage Society in April 1990, capturing the group in their 24th season. Ironically, the intervening time between the disc's original release and this reissue in Naxos American Classics' series has hardly created a crowded condition for
Cowell's music in the catalog, and these recordings are as fresh and timely as ever.
The program wisely combines items from
Cowell's so-called "futurist" and "conservative" periods, and to some extent demonstrates that these stylistic phases were not that different from one another. From in the middle of
Cowell's output comes the piano piece Deep Color, given a moving performance by Seltzer and rendered more poignant through the knowledge that the piece was written in the depths of San Quentin Prison, where
Cowell was serving hard time for a crime he did not commit. Stylistically,
Cowell's music is all over the map, ranging from the ferocious dissonances in the piano piece Tiger to the neo-Baroque sweetness of his Quartet for flute, oboe, cello & harpsichord, written for harpsichordist
Sylvia Marlowe and played to perfection here. Other highlights include violinist Mia Wu's shimmering reading of
Cowell's Suite for violin and piano; Polyphonica, a short, experimental orchestral piece in the vein of
Charles Ives' Tone Roads; and the silly Three Anti-Modernist Songs sung with aplomb by mezzo Ellen Lang. The only work that does not come off as well as one would hope is Irish Suite -- it's a quiet piece, and the engineers recorded it a bit too quietly to be properly heard.
Nonetheless, the return of Continuum ensemble's Cowell: Instrumental, Chamber and Vocal Music 1 is certainly a welcome one, and since it is now on Naxos, it hopefully will be awhile before it becomes unavailable once more.