Dos Formas del Tiempo: CD in Review
Martin Matalon, composer
Elena Klionsky, pianist
Salome Jordania, piano II (Track 4)
Eve Payeur and Julián Macedo, percussionists;
David Adamcyck, sound designer (electronics)
Joel Sachs, conductor, the New Juilliard Ensemble (Track 1)
MSR Classics: MS 1789
As fans of contemporary classical music will want to take note (if they don’t already know), an exciting CD was released this year dedicated to music by Argentinian composer Martin Matalon (b. 1958, Buenos Aires) on the MSR Classics label. The CD has four tracks, all with pianist Elena Klionsky performing in a central role, first as concerto soloist (Track 1), then as solo pianist (Tracks 2 and 3), and then as Piano I in a mixed percussion/electronic ensemble (Track 4). The works are from a timespan of fourteen years of Mr. Matalon’s output (2000-2014), and the range of techniques and expressiveness is wide.
Martin Matalon has made a growing international reputation for himself through many genres including opera, choreographic works, installations, concert music, and film scores. He has won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and he is currently the composition professor at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Lyon. Organizations performing his works have included the Orchestre de Paris, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Orquesta de Barcelona y Catalunya, MusikFabrik (Cologne), and many other ensembles. His film scores have included one for the restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (commissioned by IRCAM) as well as three for surrealistic films of Luis Buñuel.
It was at the Juilliard School in New York (while obtaining his Master of Music Degree) that Mr. Matalon met Elena Klionsky, a pianist who went on to play throughout the United States in recital, orchestral, chamber music, and duo-piano performances. In her native Russia, she has performed with leading orchestras including the Moscow State Symphony, St. Petersburg Camerata, Ural Philharmonic Orchestra, and Russian Federal Orchestra. Coming to the US, she was mentored for many years by Isaac Stern as well as at Juilliard (first in the Pre-College Division, later for BM and MM degrees). She was the first foreigner to open the annual Moscow Stars Festival in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory and has performed at the White House as part of its National Treasures event.
For full disclosure, this reviewer was at Juilliard for several of the same years as Mr. Matalon and Ms. Klionsky but missed several decades of their careers since then. Having not seen Ms. Klionsky since school days and having remembered mostly personal attributes of sensitivity, delicacy, and a Romantic aura, I was not prepared for the playing of a tigress that emerged in several of this CD’s works! From relentless ostinato patterns and clangorous clusters to trills and soft coloristic effects, and everything in between, Ms. Klionsky shows that she is not to be limited to any one niche. Mr. Matalon, then a student of Vincent Persichetti, has also clearly forged his own paths, in a way that intertwines all the arts.
Poetry takes a role in Mr. Matalon’s first work on the CD, Trames IV: Concerto for Piano and Eleven Instruments (2001) with the New Juilliard Ensemble under Joel Sachs. As the composer writes, “The generic name ‘Trame’ is inspired by a poem of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, which unveils for us the synchrony that exists among all elements constituting ‘universal history.’ Less ambitious and more circumscribed, my Trames evoke simply the ‘weaving’ proper to each composition, its ‘Ariadne thread.'” Despite its description as “less ambitious and more circumscribed” Trames IV is overwhelmingly complex in texture to the point of being dizzying. If one reads the very short Borges poem, La Trama, telling of the attack on a gaucho in Buenos Aires and the eerie connection to Julius Caesar’s betrayal 1900 years earlier, one can perhaps understand better the source of the harrowing, almost chaotic flight through time in this piece. Just to be clear, the word chaotic here is not meant to imply that the piece does not possess internal order, for though this listener failed to grasp the piece immediately in its entirety, it did seem oddly internally cohesive, as if a wrong note or beat would be easily apparent.
At sixteen and a half minutes, Trames IV comprises five continuous movements. Though we are told of a prologue and epilogue and movements in between, there is no clear boundary from one to the next, a fact that seems appropriate to its themes of connectedness. Meanwhile, its mixtures of timbres, though using familiar instruments (strings, winds, brass, a full battery of percussion), create effects that sound completely new. As with combining flavors, it is an instance of the whole being “greater than the sum of its parts.” The expressiveness ranges from ominous and other-worldly to furious in its driving piano ostinato (think of the third movement of Barber’s Piano Concerto, as if played on acid). Throughout it all, the pianist is part of the concertante texture, in which split-second timing is essential. One only wishes that this were a video recording, because the interaction had to be awe-inspiring at the live performance; it is remarkable, though, as it is. The liner notes state that this performance was recorded live at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Lincoln Center with Robert Taibbi as the engineer. Though premiered in Paris in 2001, Musical America listed this performance (2010) as the US Premiere. We can so glad that it was preserved and is shared in this CD.
The next work (Track 2) is Artificios (2014) dedicated to Elena Klionsky, who gives it its World Premiere performance here (recorded in a private studio in New York by Dale Ashley). Just around seven minutes long, it also covers a wide range, particularly in tonal register. As Mr. Matalon writes, “My interest at the time I wrote Artificios was to create polarities through a single musical parameter. I chose to underline the importance of register: how the same lines employed in the two extremes of the piano would imply a totally different perception of the material and create polarities: density and lightness, black and white, opacity and crystalline. The lines are inhabited by trills, spirals, loops, chirping birds, cascades and repeated notes.” Ms. Klionsky handles all of these components with conviction, particularly the glassy treble repeated notes, and with an improvisatory feeling that must surely have pleased the composer.
The third work, Dos Formas del Tiempo (2000, roughly translated as “Two Forms of Time”) is perhaps the most accessible work of the CD, just over seven minutes and developing its toccata-like left-hand opening in increasing complexity, syncopation, and cluster chords with never a dull moment. As the composer describes the piece, the musical “objects” that populate it include “explosions, trills, sparkling, garlands, spirals, repeated notes or resonances.” There are long stretches of crystalline motifs in a high treble register that are so subtly varying that, even if one were not enamored of the piece itself (and it is far from “easy listening”), one has to admire the pianist for processing it all and projecting it with such polish. One never gets the sense that Mr. Matalon wrote for the ease of the pianist (or for any of the instruments for that matter), but out of an urge to expand the piano’s sonic capabilities into the evocative orchestral realm of say, film scores. In fact, throughout the entire CD, one found oneself constantly imagining what images and drama would accompany it all if paired with film.
The final work on the CD, La Makina (2007, premiered in 2008 at McGill University) has the greatest sonic variety of all, through the combination of two pianos (Salome Jordania joining Ms. Klionsky) in addition to percussionists Eve Payeur and Julián Macedo, with electronic sound by David Adamcyck. The composer’s description once again partially eludes this listener’s full understanding, including “the time polarity created by the use of ‘suspended time’ as opposed to ‘pulsed time’ and the premises of lightness and density created by the use of ‘frequency zones’ which are often poles apart.” That said, there is such an ear-tickling array of sounds from the percussion instruments and electronic effects, that one can appreciate it on that level alone. In around twenty-two minutes it builds to an absolutely nightmarish peak – including what sounds like the cracking of whips – and it is hard to miss the dramatic import on at least a basic level. The performances are impressive, as with the entire CD, and the recording, by Frédéric Prin at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Rueil Malmaison, France, is excellent as well.
All in all, this CD represents a formidable achievement both for the composer and for the performers. Audiophiles, particularly contemporary music and electronic music buffs, will surely want a copy. As a bonus, those with the physical CD will appreciate the cover art (acrylic on canvas, 1994) entitled “Music” by Marc Klionsky, an especially meaningful depiction by the father of the talented Elena Klionsky.
