Leo Ornstein: Complete Works For Cello And Piano

Album review

Composer and pianist Leo Ornstein is known best for two things; (a) being the first "futurist" pianist in the early modern period and (b) being about the longest lived composer in the history of music, dying at 108 in 2002. Neither of these attributes have much to say about Ornstein's music, which has been recorded heretofore in a spotty fashion with the emphasis being on the "futurist" piano music that made his name, a style that he abandoned around 1920. Anyone familiar with his extraordinary Piano Quintet of 1927, however, will already know that Ornstein was an expert and deeply serious composer of chamber music and will be predisposed to welcome the advent of New World's Leo Ornstein: Complete Works for Cello and Piano. Performed by cellist Joshua Gordon of the Lydian String Quartet and pianist Randall Hodgkinson, this is the first "complete" recorded survey of any aspect of Ornstein's output, and the five compositions represented span a period of roughly 1914 to about 1931.
Some of this music resulted from Ornstein's friendship with cellist Hans Kindler, who later founded the National Symphony Orchestra. The Sonata No. 1 Op. 52 of 1915 is the first fruit of that relationship, bears the strongest kinship with Ornstein's futurist work, and yet remains strongly lyrical, Ornstein fighting against his own stream. All of the music here is to some degree rooted in his Russian Jewish heritage and the music that would have surrounded him at the St. Petersburg Conservatory of his youth. The Six Preludes in particular demonstrate his comfort with the arcing line of cello, mystic Scriabin-esque harmonies and widely spaced chords in the piano in slow movements and propulsively rhythmic fast movements that recall some of the best characteristics of his futurist music. Some of it makes you think of Bartók, but it doesn't sound like Bartók at all and seems more like a halfway house between post-romanticism and the early modern. It is great music and doesn't sound in the least dated or derivative. Perhaps a better comparison would be to early Roslavets or Alexander Krein, yet Ornstein is tighter and more focused than Roslavets and considerably less "ethnic" sounding than Krein. Ornstein's music sounds more Russian than American, and is more "romantic" in feel, while remaining stubbornly modern in terms of its harmonic building blocks.
It sounds like major music, and these are major performers -- Gordon has studied this music closely and he and Hodgkinson have worked out the knotty problems relating to Ornstein's impatience in writing his music down. In some cases they have had to rely on their own reading of the pieces to get the fine details down in terms of dynamics, tempo, and expression, as Ornstein's scores are silent on this point. All of New World's Leo Ornstein: Complete Works for Cello and Piano is absorbing and revelatory, and the recording, from Mechanics Hall in Worcester, MA, is just right.

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