BRESNICK Willie’s Way.1 Falling.2 Ballade.3 Three Choral Songs.4 Every Thing Must Go5 • 1, 3Lisa Moore (pn); 2Abigail Nims (sop); 2Wei-yi Yang (pn); 3Ashley Bathgate (vc); 4Marguerite Brooks, cond; 4Yale Camerata; 5Prism Saxophone Quartet • ALBANY TROY1184 (59:39)

Martin Bresnick (b. 1946) by now is no stranger to these pages. He’s one of the most substantial composers of his generation, and he also has the distinction through his teaching gig at Yale of having mentored and launched a host of young composers who have moved on to brilliant careers. Aside from his own music, the history of late 20th/early 21st-century American music may well single him out as the Boulanger of the era.

But as said, to his own work, this disc is a collection of old and new works, in a sense a gathering of pieces that don’t fall into any single easy category (unlike the still-impressive Opere della Music Povera, a cycle by which the composer planted his aesthetic flag firmly for all to see). Willie’s Way (2006) is a solo piano work based on the blues song Spoonful by Willie Dixon. It’s a reworking of the Fantasia on a Theme of Willie Dixon from 2001 (released on New World 80635-2, and which I reviewed in Fanfare 20:3). I like this version better. The piece is an artful blend of Brahms and the blues, and Bresnick subjects the changes to every twist possible to wrest as much harmonic richness and diversity as possible. At first I thought it perhaps a little too long for its materials, but I changed my mind by the second listening. The piece also feels like an homage to Rzewski, in both its popular source and the extended techniques (clapping, stomping, singing) at the end. The composer’s muse, collaborator, and life partner, Lisa Moore, is magisterial in her interpretation.

There’s another blues-tinged work on the program, and it’s a knockout. Falling is a much earlier work from 1993, a song cycle based on poems by Southerners David Bottoms and Katherine Stripling Byer. Its subject is the failings of the human heart, filtered through the experience of poor white folk that are usually relegated to talk-show mockery, and not given their proper dignity. This work does them justice, and more. The “bluesiness” is always powerful, dramatic, and never cheap. (One regret in this release is that there are no texts provided for either this work or the choral one. Abigail Nims’s enunciation is excellent, but it still helps to have a text at hand to get a sense of its “globality,” rather than trying to hold onto the words in memory alone.)

The 2004 Ballade for cello and piano is also Brahmsian in its tone and sound, and with what sounds like an underlying passacaglia structure. The 1988 Three Choral Songs (on Poems of Amichai) are scrupulously crafted a cappella miniatures, but they didn’t speak as deeply to me as the other works on the disc. But the 2007 Every Thing Must Go for saxophone quartet is fresh, playful, and moving at once. It seems something of a new avenue for the composer, as I hear a lot of “spectral” elements (i.e., overtone-based harmonies), most evident in the middle memorial movement to Bresnick’s teacher György Ligeti. It’s in three short movements, only about 13 minutes total; the Prism matches its demands with a marvelous purity of color and intonation.

Highly recommended, though again, there’s a slight feeling of a “sweeping up” of pieces not yet recorded, old and new. But nothing wrong with that, especially when it’s all so good. It does make me hungry, though, for a work or series of works comparable to the Opere. And I can’t help but regret there’s not more orchestral music out there from the composer. While this is probably partly choice—Bresnick has a very original sense of how to write grandly for chamber groupings—I also can’t help but think it’s also an index of the bone-headedness of so much of the American orchestral establishment. For meaty music of a Beethovenian or Brahmsian cast, without pandering pastiche, this is the man. Why don’t I know more than one piece in the Opere cycle? Maybe I’ve missed something out there?

- Robert Carl
This article originally appeared in Issue 34:1 (Sept/Oct 2010) of Fanfare Magazine.