Release Date: 01 June 2005
Label: Naxos / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 636943922620
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: KIM
Description
Earl Kim (1920-1998)Violin Concerto Dialogues CornetEarl Kim was born in 1920 in Dinuba, California andstudied with Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Bloch, andRoger Sessions. He was a professor at Princeton from1952 to 1967 and at Harvard from then until 1998, andwas the recipient of numerous awards and commissions.He died of lung cancer in 1998.As a composer Earl Kim was a master craftsmanand an unabashed romantic. He had a deep familiaritywith the language of Western classical music but alsofound inspiration elsewhere in Korean folk-song, aJapanese rock garden, the Javanese gamelan, a musicboxlullaby, the whirling dervishes. Despite the varietyof his sources his pointed and economical voice isalways unique and recognisable, his music alwaysbeautifully made and immediately appealing.Kim was never one to accept the ordinary. Forinstance he adapts the serialism invented by his teacherArnold Schoenberg to suit his affective or dramaticpurposes. In Enough, a melodrama from Kim's secondevening-length music/theatre piece on texts by SamuelBeckett (Narratives, 1979), Kim attaches two-notefigures to each new important pronoun or noun in thenarrated text until the crucial word 'enough' is reached.At that point in this bleak landscape, he has completed atwelve-tone row. The first six notes of that row are thenused in the instrumental interludes between each sectionof text. That same six-note array (hexachord) appears inother pieces in Narratives helping to unify the entireevening; it is also the pitch collection found mostfrequently in Schoenberg's diatribe against tyranny, theOde to Napoleon Bonaparte.In several of his best-known pieces Kim refines thistechnique even further by constructing the discourse outof a series of musical palindromes (mirror images).Dead Calm from Exercises en Route, Kim's firstmusic/theatre piece on Beckett texts, is the most famousexample of this technique. In the Violin Concerto,written for Itzhak Perlman in 1979, the opening'sheavily muted string chords are palindromic. The firstchord of that series provides the three notes for theopening solo melody which itself is palindromic. Theensuing section has three parts, a rhythmically vigorousexchange between solo violin and orchestra with pitchesdrawn from successive six-note groups, a gamelan-likeorchestral interlude that employs an inversion of theopening three notes, and finally a return to the exchangesection with the pitch groups in reverse order, all ofwhich yields another large-scale palindrome. Rigorousas these structural underpinnings are the musical surfaceit supports - still, pulsating, pale, colourful, lonely,crowded - is beguiling in its variety.As Milan Kundera says about one of the charactersfrom his novel The Joke, 'he was never satisfied withreaching the mind, he had to get at the emotions...' Inthe Violin Concerto, the Episode in Part 2 features anextraordinarily touching arioso violin line over anundulating two-note accompaniment. It is a reflectionon the opening gest
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
Various
Various
Lully
