When Bridge Records released Music of Ursula Mamlok, Vol. 1, composer Ursula Mamlok was 85 years old and living in Berlin, the city where she was born. Mamlok hadn't lived there since 1939, when she escaped with her family to America just ahead of Nazi forces. The list of Mamlok's teachers read like a who's-who of who is important in the twentieth century:
Ernst Krenek, Roger Sessions, Stefan Wolpe, and
Ralph Shapey among them. Mamlok adopted serialism in the early '60s during her tutelage with Wolpe and refined it under
Shapey; she initially published her music through the legendary house of McGinnis & Marx, the same concern that brought out Wolpe's first American scores. Along the way, Mamlok quietly picked up major foundation grants and a Guggenheim Fellow while teaching composition at various New York area universities, finally retiring from the Manhattan School of Music.
However, Ursula Mamlok never became famous, nor was her work widely recorded; the CRI label managed to get out two CDs of her music not long before the label expired in 2002. With Music of Ursula Mamlok, Vol. 1, Bridge Records picked up the thread left dangling and with expert performers.
Garrick Ohlsson performs Mamlok's piano piece 2000 Names (2000),
Heinz Holliger chips in with the Concerto for Oboe & Chamber Orchestra (1976/2003), and the Concertino for Wind Quintet, String Orchestra & Percussion is heard as rendered by the excellent
Odense Symphony Orchestra under
Scott Yoo. This disc covers Mamlok's compositional voice over a near 50-year trajectory, and there is a clear rite of stylistic passage followed in the timeline, even though it is given in a somewhat scrambled order in the program. The pieces written under Wolpe's tutelage, Designs (1962) and the String Quartet No. 1 (1962) are low-key, loose, and nearly improvisatory pieces, whereas the Concertino is brightly colored, enthusiastic as the movement titles would tend to imply ("Energetic," "Joyful," etc.). Even the movement marked "Elegy" is not particularly elegiac; perhaps mildly perturbed would be a better description. Moreover, this kind of bright and gentle brand of serialism appears to be what Mamlok is at her best in; the angularity and violent gestures of the Oboe Concerto and Haiku Settings for Soprano and Flute (1967) are a bit forced and these pieces and seem to belong to their time more readily than the others. While the liner notes routinely refer to her early Woodwind Quintet (1956) as neo-classical -- a style Mamlok admits she abandoned -- remember that György Ligeti composed his Six Bagatelles for the same combination just three years earlier, and that Ligeti and Mamlok were born in the same year. By comparison, the Mamlok is decidedly tougher stuff.
One of the CRI discs featured Mamlok on the front cover, posing with bright sunflowers against a garish peach backdrop. While the Bridge release is more demure -- with Mamlok seated with one of her published editions in the background, the CRI image was not an inappropriate one -- the kindly lady who could be one's neighbor, except that she writes serial music. If this intrigues you, then there is no better medium to get through to Mamlok than this Bridge release, and given the talent pool being brought to this project, any subsequent volumes will tend to be of comparable quality.