David Leisner prides himself on being a composer/performer -- a common role for musicians in history and still so in popular music, but much rarer in classical circles nowadays -- yet his writing abilities are not an equal match for his skills as a guitarist. Self-Portrait, his 2006 release on Azica, features
Leisner performing five original solo works that allow him many opportunities to display his impeccable execution and impressive virtuosity, despite the physical disability of focal dystonia. But his music as a whole suffers from a lack of direction and stylistic uncertainty, as if he had too many possibilities to choose from and too many ideas to work out.
Leisner's Nel Mezzo: Sonata (1998) is a tonal work, like everything he writes, yet its long chromatic runs and disquieting dissonances make it feel amorphous and ungrounded, and the mood throughout is dark and dyspeptic. The music's character is quite different in Four Pieces (1985-1986), which are lighter, cheerier, and more folk-like in tone; the few modernist touches may suggest an ironic outlook, but
Leisner seems not to be making any satirical points, either here or in the "Billy Boy" Variations (1983), a relaxed piece that partakes of a similar kind of brightness and naïveté. But
Leisner's Passacaglia and Toccata (1982) has a labored, academic quality that makes it heavy and brooding; and the Freedom Fantasies (1992, rev. 2003) is something of a hodgepodge of blues licks, showy guitar riffs, and fragments of spirituals, and feels like an earnest political commentary that falls apart because of its fragmentary and diverse musical content. Such eclecticism is certainly part of the contemporary aesthetic, and
Leisner is as free to dabble in it as any other composer. Yet while the mix of styles on this album seems due more to the works' wide time span than to any deliberate planning,
Leisner's approach to composition still appears sporadic, rather than steady and purposeful. Azica's sound is clear and focused, with natural resonance and presence.