Critical Commentary
The September/October 2013 issue of Fanfare Magazine carried reviews
of the four CDs recently released on KASP Records (see previous menu)
and included interviews with Mateusz Borowiak (the pianist for the last
recording) and me. All this was as I had contracted, for I wished to
present the results of this mammoth multi-CD project to the public in a
dignified and comprehensive manner. What I did not expect was that Joel
Flegler, Fanfare’s editor and publisher, evidently finding the music
deserving, secretly approached not one but three reviewers to critique
each work in turn. I present excerpts of these commentaries here and
conclude with relevant passages from Mateusz’s interview.
****
David DeBoor Canfield: From the opening notes of [String Quartet No.1]
on the first CD…, I was gripped by the heartfelt emotional intensity of the
music that came to my ears… His is clearly music of its time, but not
molded according to any current or past trends. The flowing lines of the
quartet are underscored by gently dissonant sonorities, whose tension
never lets up despite its greater or lesser prominence over the course of
the work… Its second movement is entitled “I Weave You A Shroud,” and
is embedded with almost gut-wrenching pathos. The entire quartet is spun
out from a germ that consists of a rising fourth followed by a major third.
The composer considers this his first mature work. This reviewer certainly
views it as such, quite worthy to be placed in any quartet recital. Only in
the final movement does the rhythmic activity pick up to any degree, and
the figuration that is handed around to each of the instruments sustains
interest very well.
Prayer Suite for violin and piano was originally written as a memorial to the
parents of the composer’s wife, but upon her death he rededicated it to her
memory. This one-movement suite of several sections seems to well
portray in its rapidly changing moods the various components of prayer
(adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication). This is music that
is profound while maintaining accessibility to players and hearers alike.
I Weave You A Shroud is for a cappella vocal sextet, although it was
originally written for a seven-part full chorus with soloists. The title was
created by the composer’s wife…, who used it for the thousands of
drawings she created to memorialize specific victims of the Holocaust.
The music is drawn almost entirely from the composer’s String Quartet
No.1, but between the arrangement and the much different timbre of the
singers, it didn’t sound at all familiar to my ears, which just minutes before
had auditioned the quartet.
The CD is closed out with Pelosi’s String Quartet No.2, which bears the
subtitle of “Rosemarie Koczÿ In Memoriam”… It is additionally an act of
homage to Bach, containing the opening theme of his D Minor Concerto,
BWV 1052, albeit transposed down a half step in an attempt to re-create
the actual key of what would have been considered D Minor in Bach’s day.
The last note of the quartet is its fulcrum throughout, and is intended as an
expressions of the composer’s undying love for his departed wife. It is a
very touching effect — and piece.
The second CD of this set … is devoted to Pelosi’s 37 Inventions, Canons
and Fugues: Variations on a Single Motif for piano, a major work of more
than an hour’s duration, and a sequel to the composer’s 13 Preludes and
Fugues… Pelosi’s style is immediately recognizable in the harmonic
structure of these works, but they go somewhat beyond most of the other
pieces under review here in terms of strict contrapuntal writing…
Obviously, a work of this sort allows its creator to demonstrate his
craftsmanship, and Pelosi does so very convincingly. Even Hindemith in
his much-admired Ludus Tonalis does not exceed the skill that Pelosi
brings to this work.
The third disc ... returns to chamber music, beginning with Pelosi’s Piano
Trio. The first movement begins with a busy opening… Repeated notes ...
serve to impart a restless character… The second and concluding
movement of the work slows the tempo down quite a bit, and is double the
length of that of the first… This movement is introspective, and evokes a
feeling of a time fondly and nostalgically remembered. There are also
elegiac aspects…
The Woodwind Quartet … is a major addition to the woodwind literature…
I would put it on the same level of inspiration as the much admired (and
performed) Trois pièces brèves of Jacques Ibert.
Pelosi’s Elegy for Brass Quintet (Revisited)…was originally composed in
tribute to a family friend, but after the death of his wife, the composer
expanded the work and made it a eulogy for her. As expected, the work
is somber, and is slightly reminiscent of the Barber Adagio for Strings,
with its long flowing lines, albeit containing slightly more piquant
harmonies, and a few lively moments en route.
The composer closes out his series of works in tribute to his wife with his
String Quartet No.3… To symbolize the act of “closing,” Pelosi has
brought back material from the first movement of the quartet to conclude
the fourth movement. Along the way, he has also utilized subjects,
patterns, and textures found in the first movement… As intended, the
quartet makes a profound impression… Much great art has been created
by composers and other artists who have suffered loss. The works on
these tribute CDs are, I can attest, great art…
The final item in this group of recordings is a two-disc set devoted to
Pelosi’s 13 Preludes and Fugues, with Epilogue… Even more than the
37 Inventions, Canons and Fugues, this series…delineates clearly
articulated contrapuntal lines… There is much variety in these works such
that the listener’s attention never flags… [T]his work stands up very well
against others of its kind, such as Shostakovich’s cycle of preludes and
fugues…
In short, Louis Pelosi is a remarkable composer, and if his music doesn’t
touch you, I’d be very surprised…
*****
Colin Clarke: [In] String Quartet No. 1…there is a sure hand at work,
both in the contrapuntal workings of the first movement (some material
from which reappears in the Grand Fugue from the 13 Preludes and
Fugues…) and the lyricism of the quarter-hour second… [T]he third
movement is actually the slow movement proper, a Lentamente assai
that speaks with a glorious, held-breath purity before segueing into a
sprightly finale…
The Prayer Suite…is a most approachable piece, shot through with an
autumnal glow… [I]ts poignancy is most eloquent…
The performance reproduced here of I Weave You A Shroud ... is ... spirited
…at times bringing to mind the close imitations of Elizabethan madrigals.
String Quartet No. 2 ... is not easy listening, but neither is contemplating
another’s grief… Yet we should meditate on these things, as death seeks
us all, eventually. Pelosi offers us a way, by sharing his own pain.
Perhaps the blossoming of the Bach later in the piece is to invoke some
sort of transcendental place of hope? As I say, not easy listening.
The 37 Inventions, Canons and Fugues that comprise part two of the
memorial is the sequel to 13 Preludes and Fugues, with Epilogue… The
composer states that it also completes the other, contemporaneous
piece in terms of contrapuntal emphasis. Inventions dominate the
earlier part, while fugues dominate the later part with strict canons
being inserted at regular intervals like a sort of structural tactus… Along
the way comes a variety of fugues, from the massively angular Fugue in
F# to the solemn yet contemplative Fugue in E (a piece which puts me in
mind of late Beethoven) and the playful but bittersweet Fugue in A and
beyond. The finale. which itself comprises part five in its entirety, oozes
breadth.
The Piano Trio … (no surprises here) uses a double fugue to bring the
various strands together. [A] theme of the slow movement is taken from
the Inventions, Canons and Fugues…, the second subject from No.26, to
be accurate, music that Pelosi was composing when his wife died … the
work finds Pelosi once more in poignant expression… there is a
particularly effective moment just after the seven-minute mark when the
music opens out to hope, a little akin to opening a window to let the
fresh air in…
The Woodwind Quartet is a delight, especially the “pecking” staccatos of
the first movement. There is, of course, counterpoint in various guises
aplenty (we have learned by now that counterpoint is the composer’s life
blood), while there are some poignant harmonies to the central Tranquillo.
The finale is as jaunty as they come…
The brass Elegy ... is a rather grim work, but powerfully so.
Finally, String Quartet No.3. The composer writes that this piece “finally
brings to a close my decision to record in music my devotion to my
beloved Rosemarie”… The second theme [of the first movement]
effectively depicts Rosemarie (the composer refers to it “coming from”
her)… [In] the second movement, with its contrasts of pizzicato against
somewhat restless, legato, arco lines…, the chorale-like hymnic passages
carry a weight of grief with them that is banished by the pizzicato… The
third movement is the emotional heart of the work, another powerful
elegy… The finale contains struggle, as any grief process must … yet the
sweetness towards the close reminds us there is hope yet. The work ends
with a question mark, as really it must.
13 Preludes and Fugues, with Epilogue … are arranged into groups of
four, with the fourth group being the longest and most demonstrative (the
cycle ends with a Grand Fugue in C for “2, 3, 4 and 5 voices”). The First
Prelude immediately sets out Pelosi’s credentials as a multifaceted
composer. There are tonal references, but they are rather suspended…
The deliberate frustration of expectations … early on seems to … prepare
us for the longer pieces later in the cycle… It becomes immediately
obvious … when we arrive at the Grand Prelude … that Pelosi is moving
up a notch… That the Prelude lasts eight minutes and the Fugue ten
reflects this… The Fugue is knotty and unpredictable, with an oasis of
calm towards the end that provides a moment of soul-stilling peace… A
brief, three-minute, chorale-like epilogue … with moments of quasi-
improvisation, rounds off a fascinating listening experience… There is a
range and breadth of expression here that, despite the fact this work
spreads over two discs and lasts around an hour and a half, seems only
hinted at… Recommended.
****
Lynn René Bayley: This was one of the more daunting challenges
thrown at me by our editor. These [four] CDs … came to me out of the
blue with a sticky note saying “Special assignment … one review with
[four] headnotes.” Immediately, then, I was asked to immerse myself in
the music of a composer completely unknown to me and hopefully like it
enough to encourage others to do the same.
He needn’t have worried. One listen to parts of CD 3 in this series, and I
knew that, whatever his background, Louis Pelosi was an outstanding
composer whose work sounds like no one else’s. I was hooked.
… I discovered that Pelosi … “declined to enter academia or the
commercial music world,” choosing instead to make his living as a “self-
employed piano technician.” Already I liked him! Happily, the quality of his
music only fed my enthusiasm for him as a person… I heartily applaud his
personal decision to work outside the system. It has allowed him to
create music that pleases himself first and foremost, and by doing so he
has maintained an extraordinarily high standard as well as his personal
integrity…
Focusing on String Quartet No.1 … one is struck by the unusual balance
of the movements: the second movement is as long as the first and third
put together, and in fact almost as long as the entire String Quartet No. 2.
Thus one can see, even before listening, that the weight of the music is
tilted in that direction, somewhat like the slow movement of Schubert’s
“Death and the Maiden” Quartet…
As it turns out, the second movement is not (as one might expect) an
elegiac lament but rather a rhythmically energetic piece written in a
dense contrapuntal style — yet again, Pelosi defies what we might expect
to hear. Indeed, despite his later setting of it for voices, it is far less
lyrical or songlike than the first movement and, if anything, the
contrapuntal web it weaves entraps the melodic fragments and its
permutations in a tight enclosure. In a sense, then, this music is a shroud,
and only when it pauses and becomes more ruminative (following which
pizzicato violin and viola lead back to an even tighter contrapuntal section)
does one feel the least bit of relaxation in the music. Eventually, with a
high held violin note, relaxation finally arrives, but the mood then remains
restless and sad. The remaining two movements, played without
interruption, comment on and expand some of the motifs heard earlier.
The Prayer Suite … was built around a short “song-like piano piece
[Pelosi] wrote upon meeting [Rosemarie] … in 1980,” a large chamber
work composed for her the following year, and “the expansion of this
composition into a violin concerto” … that was never performed. It’s a
fascinating piece that shows how adept Pelosi is at writing terser and more
condensed works; nothing sounds particularly rushed or compressed, yet
rather unfolds like the opening of a flower, each petal unique and both
inspiring and enticing the listener as the musical journey goes on. I heard
this piece as being a concerto, with the piano part acting more like an
orchestral than as a solo accompaniment. It only occasionally plays
underlying chords to set off the violin, but rather most of the time goes its
own way, weaving a separate musical story and thus making the piece
even richer in both texture and meaning.
I Weave You A Shroud, as it turns out, begins in a more morbid vein than
the instrumental piece it is based on… Nevertheless, as the piece goes
on, one is caught up in the highly interesting and individual way Pelosi
writes for voices, and the music develops … quite independent of the
string quartet … it is based on.
String Quartet No.2 is an entirely different animal from the First. …the
juxtaposition of slow and fast sections almost makes it sound episodic.
This is not intended as a criticism, but merely as description. It is very
unusual music — once again pointing out how individual Pelosi is as a
composer… [T]he piece works because Pelosi’s musical mind knows how
to knit things together and not make it sound either contrived or
hackneyed. It’s a remarkable piece, continuous throughout its eighteen
and a half minutes, and has so many things to say that it holds your
attention from start to finish.
The second CD consists entirely of his 78-minute work, 37 Inventions,
Canons and Fugues on a Single Motif. …it’s one of those works (of
which there are so very few in the piano literature) that can actually be
excerpted or played in its entirety … [T]he “transposable motif” on which
all 37 pieces are based [is] a “central pitch, a fourth below and a fourth
above it.” … Yet what Pelosi is able to do with this three-note snippet (for
that is, really, all it is) is quite amazing and complex… As the collection
wends its way along, one is aware that the music becomes more and
more abstract, denser, and more emotionally foreboding. The final
peroration is the densest and craggiest music of all: a mixture of canons,
inventions, and fugues, eventually riding a long, slow diminuendo into the
ether.
Following such a piece, Pelosi’s Piano Trio, which opens CD 3, almost
sounds Brahmsian in its melodic contours and primarily tonal bias. …like
Brahms, Pelosi has found a way to incorporate older forms — in this case,
a double fugue — into his own musical language and make it breathe with
an entirely new life…
The Woodwind Quartet … written (Pelosi tells us) before Rosemarie’s
illness and death, is a cheerful, upbeat piece, contrasting a slow
movement … between two faster ones. Written in quasi-canon form and
using “strict imitative procedures,” the music chirps along in its happy
journey from start to finish.
The Elegy for Brass Quintet (Revisited) begins and ends in sadness, but
there is a decidedly upbeat, celebratory section in ragtime rhythm that
gives a momentary respite from the dominant mood. Like so many of
Pelosi’s pieces, however, the music continually morphs in mood, texture,
and complexity, and one need only open one’s ears to ride the wave of his
imagination.
String Quartet No. 3, at least in the first movement, is built around a
repeated four-note descending motif which returns in canon form, then
becomes a fugue while developing and changing, Yet those four notes
continue to dominate the proceedings, even when the tempo suddenly
picks up, though it is then disguised somewhat before its return in the
slower tempo… The second movement is characterized by pizzicato in a
relaxed tempo, which creates an unusual feeling of rhythmic stasis rather
than momentum, and in the Largo, Pelosi’s gift for writing lovely yet sad
melodies imbues the music with its melancholy — the principal movement
dedicated to Rosemarie, though [he] indicates that “When it returns, its
counterpoint, or rather its counterpart, is … me.” There is a tremendous
feeling of quietude to this music, at the end more a feeling of fading into
the vapor than of resolution. The last movement, despite its up-tempo
feeling, is never quite settled or comfortable, but rather is the most
fragmented movement of the four; at the end, the lead violin flies up into
the stratosphere, alone and unsupported, in a quiet lament.
13 Preludes and Fugues, with Epilogue: [t]his disc … may be taken to be,
in essence, Vol. 4 of Louis Pelosi’s tribute to his late wife, Rosemarie
Koczÿ. The composer explains that they were essentially written for her
even though the score is dedicated to his two principal teachers, Susan
Tenenbaum and Arnold Franchetti… Pelosi’s style is uniquely his own…
In the early part … the preludes tend to be fairly brief, the fugues extended
and thus establishing themselves as the cornerstones or foundation of the
work as a whole. Because of this unusual balance, the fugues not only
dominate the listener’s consciousness but also become a sort of nexus,
which binds the work together, as well as making much of it sound
continuous to the listener. This is also conditioned by the nature of the
preludes which, as they become busier and louder, begin to resemble the
fugues as well. Yet these are mere generalizations one can make during
the listening experience. Since the music grabs the mind and very
carefully makes an imprint on it, one can hear the connections between
the individual pieces without having specific themes or Leitmotifs
hammered out. Harmonic and rhythmic cells within the music recur and
yet morph; it is music that says something, and does not just “make a
nice impression” as so much modern music does. Pelosi’s cycle may
never achieve the status or popularity of other such works in this genre,
but it deserves to do so… One could easily go on at considerable length,
and in considerable detail, over the remarkable quality of this score, but in
the end the listening experience says far more than words can… As with
the triptych reviewed above, I recommend this disc very highly.
****
Interview with Mateusz Borowiak:
Q: When and how did you and Louis Pelosi meet?
A: It is a long story. One day I received a call from the Friends of the
Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, suggesting a recording
project of a “monumental, polyphonic work” by American composer Louis
Pelosi… I had a lot of engagements at that time, so, prudently, I asked to
see the score of the work before agreeing to take it on. The full score, in
beautiful, uncannily precise handwriting, arrived a few weeks later, leaving
me to explore the work before finally agreeing to go ahead with the
recording…
Q: What qualities in his music appealed to you?
A: When I first saw the score, I was struck by the immense thought-
processes that seemed to govern the writing. It was a monumental work,
both in painstaking attention to detail and large-scale form. I noticed a
very unique harmonic and tonal language, in fact, one that I had never
experienced before. The more I explored the Preludes and Fugues, the
more I could appreciate the lack of superfluity. In fact, I could extract an
endless amount of meaning out of every sound, motive, or harmonic
gesture. You cannot imagine the satisfaction one has when delving
deeper and deeper into musical material, to find seemingly endless
interpretational solutions.
Q: Given that Louis is not really a pianist himself, do you find his piano
writing pianistic?
A: I think his music has such a strong structural integrity that it is above
any discussion of pianistic or unpianistic writing. It uses the sonority and
colors of the piano very well and does not require extreme resources, but
somehow I feel it would also sound good for any other group of
instruments…
Q: What were some of the pianistic challenges in Pelosi’s magnum opus?
A: The immense complexity of the counterpoint was the biggest
challenge. I particularly wanted the construction to be apparent to
listeners, so that they could perceive it in a similar way to looking at a
complex piece of architecture… I also wanted to show the shattering
emotional aspect of the work… Louis seemed to like the result; I hope that
will also be the case with other people!