Music Review: Jeremias Schwarzer – ‘New Recorder Concertos’

Antagonistic – that’s the word to describe Madjnun, the one-movement concerto for recorder by Samir Odeh-Tamimi. The piece opens a new four-work album of assertively contemporary music featuring recorder player Jeremias Schwarzer, who is accompanied by a different ensemble in each piece.

Although, no, “accompanied” isn’t quite the word for Madjnun. The often percussive orchestra seems to challenge and threaten the soloist incessantly.

Listening to the Recorder with Fresh Ears

While the recorder’s flutter and other effects may call to mind a miniature, sped-up shakuhachi, this piece is diametrically opposed to the meditative associations of the Japanese instrument. Its hostility derives from “Layla and Majnun,” the ancient Arab tale and narrative poem referenced in the title. It’s a Romeo and Juliet-like story of lovers forced apart, in this case because the young man is seen as mentally unstable, hence the nickname “Majnun” which means crazy or possessed by djinn. Odeh-Tamimi makes of this theme a musical battle royale. The orchestra gives no quarter, and the recorder gets no succor, right up to the door-slams in the coda.

A very different sense of unease pervades The Guest by Liza Lim. Here recorder and orchestra bathe together in rippling washes of sound. The ear can’t always tease them apart. Schwarzer brings several recorders to this particular challenge, including a tenor and a baroque alto. The name of the latter reminds us that when we hear a recorder in concert today it’s usually in a baroque or early music setting. This is a far cry from those traditions.

Tonality and atonality clash repeatedly, the latter usually winning out. And whatever is happening thematically, whichever instrument is in Schwarzer’s hands, the recorder parts are all of a piece with the orchestra’s. Halfway through, a series of exposed passages spotlight the soloist. But even there, some other wind player or percussionist is always snaking in and around the recorder.

Collaborative Composition

In contrast, Dai Fujikura’s Recorder Concerto features the soloist “downstage” through much of its 13 minutes. The piece requires extended techniques and technical virtuosity, yet feels thoroughly natural. This likely results from the composer’s method of working with the musicians as he writes, incorporating their ideas and capabilities to create an organic tapestry of intriguing yet natural language.

On the sopranino recorder, for example, Schwarzer sounds like a bird (or more accurately, birds), though in the kind of resonant context in which you’ll never hear a biological bird. After the bird takes flight in relatively clear air, a deeper instrument (the bassett recorder, I think) draws responses from the orchestra and deploys a multi-tone technique, warbling warily and pulling down a night-time mood.

For Whistle Blower, composer Iris ter Schiphorst employed a similar collaborative process, but she adds sampled sounds as well as vocalizations from the orchestra to create a jerky electro-operatic march. The piece is a workout for the soloist, who must “speak and sing while simultaneously playing the most precise glissandi and microtonal figures,” as the liner notes describe it. The anxiety recalls Madjnun but paradoxically, despite the references to real historical violence and the presence of actual human voices, results in what feels like a more abstract struggle between soloist and orchestra. The actual words and references seem to stand in for the ineffable general woes of the human condition.

These four works, each remarkable in its own way, spotlight the wide-ranging skills and creativity of Jeremias Schwarzer himself as well as the composers’ challenging, sharply delineated visions. Each features a different German orchestra, which is a jab in the ribs of music scenes in other Western lands where most music like this inhabits a little-noticed fringe. The recordings were no picnic to make, surely, but they offer valuable nourishment to anyone anxious for something new from a very old instrument.

New Recorder Concertos is out now on New Focus.