Sounds Heard: Music from Raritan River—Newman & Oltman Guitar Duo

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Newman & Oltman Guitar Duo
Music from Raritan River
MSR Classics MS 1298

Music by Dusan Bogdanovic, Lowell Liebermann, Roberto Sierra, Augusta Read Thomas, Michael Karmon, Rami Vamos, and Randall Avers

 

While chamber musicians on the whole often seem more open to contemporary music than their orchestral counterparts, certain ensembles by their very nature are considerably more amenable to trying something new than others. Thanks to the efforts of groups like the Kronos and Arditti Quartets, there is no shortage of performances of recent string quartets; but on the whole, string quartets, for whom treasured repertoire exists spanning four centuries, are less hungry for material than, say, saxophone quartets or percussion groups. (Although considering the abundance of great 20th- and 21st-century repertoire that has been composed for these ensembles, that might not always be the case.)

Like saxophone quartets and percussion ensembles, guitar duos can’t boast of having original works by the likes of Mozart or Beethoven, but they have been around long enough to acquire a significant body of idiomatic repertoire. However, the guitar is unfortunately somewhat ghettoized in new music, with only practitioners of the instrument devoting significant attention to it—and all too frequently the music of those practitioners, despite its quality, never travels beyond the guitar-obsessed community.

This is why a disc of music for guitar duo devoted to a broad range of composers, including work by composers not typically associated with the guitar, is pretty exciting. And the fact that it was recorded by the long established Newman & Oltman Guitar Duo, a group that has been around for over 30 years, gives the project even more significance. It is certainly a joy to hear guitars playing music by Lowell Liebermann and Augusta Read Thomas, two composers I would not have associated with the instrument. While Liebermann has composed a sonata for flute and guitar that is pretty well known within the guitar-playing community and which has even been recorded a fair number of times, I think of Liebermann primarily for his lush orchestral works or his marvelous solo piano nocturnes which, despite being firmly rooted in a Post-Romantic sound world, could not have been written in any other time but our own. His Nocturne-Fantasy, composed in 2000, is an equal amalgam of past and present, but the expansiveness of his phrases has particular poignancy on guitars which have rarely been involved in performing music of this type. Similarly, Thomas’s maximalist music has rarely sounded so tender and intimate as it does in her 2005 memory:SWELLS.

The disc also includes three short and amusing compositions jointly composed by guitarists Rami Vamos and Randall Ayers, who collaborated on the music while they were college students in Ohio, as well as more substantive works by Michael Karmon and Dušan Bogdanović—two composers who have had long associations with the guitar. Their respective works—Karmon’s Caught in the Headlights and Bogdanović’s Sevdalinka—revel in each composer’s profound understanding of the instrument’s possibilities. To add to the variety, Sevdalinka also throws a string quartet into the mix, creating a fascinating new chamber music configuration that can hold its own against the ubiquitous piano quintet.

Existing somewhere between the extremes of guitar-based new music composers and the rest of the composer community is Roberto Sierra. Sierra has composed a ton of music involving the guitar—solos, concertos, chamber works, you name it. But he has also written scads of other things. He is a rare composer who is perfectly at home within and beyond the world of the guitar. And his Three Hungarian Tributes offer the best of both worlds—simultaneously bringing new ideas to the table as well as an insider’s craftsmanship. I was particularly blown away by the work’s final movement, “à Ligeti,” a tribute to his one-time teacher and mentor, which does on guitars what the zany piano etudes of Ligeti’s later years do on a keyboard. Works such as these prove that you can do whatever you want compositionally with guitars, and players like Newman and Oltman will be ready for it.