The listener's eye may fall on a line in the booklet notes: "Thanks to the more open times, I now felt free to write as I felt." Conductor and composer
José Serebrier, describing his 1999 orchestral work Winterreise, refers not to totalitarian censorship but of the academic-mandated modernism that stifled crowd-pleasing new music in America for so long. And crowd-pleasing this music is indeed. The central work on the program is the opening Symphony No. 2 (Partita) of 1958, which was conducted by the Uruguayan-born
Serebrier in his first appearance on an American podium, leading the
National Symphony Orchestra. It is not the neo-Classic music that the movement titles (Prelude, Fugue) might suggest, but a weighty score containing several shattering moments (sample the "Funeral March") of the sort that percussionists live for. The Prelude is a sort of extended-tonality updating of
Copland's Latin style, akin in spirit if not in technical rigor to the tough use of Latin idioms that Alberto Ginastera had already dispersed across American orchestral programs. The final Fugue movement is contrapuntal but has sharp dynamic contrasts and vigorous percussion activity. The Fantasia for strings (1960) is a gentler work but no less passionate. The last two works on the program are linked. The Sonata for violin solo (1948) was composed when
Serebrier was nine; it is a rather rambling piece, but
Serebrier returned to it interestingly as a kind of touchstone in the concluding Winterreise, a sort of fast ride on a snowmobile that alludes to a variety of winter-themed compositions (although not to Schubert's song cycle). One could hardly imagine a more successful reading of these works.
Serebrier brought to the recording a lifetime of conducting experience, and the
London Philharmonic Orchestra enthusiastically responded. The timpanist, who really deserves credit somewhere on the packaging, is especially compelling, and the sound engineering (the recording was originally made for the Reference label, not for Naxos) is superb. A real find that should be heard not only by lovers of twentieth century orchestral music, but also by symphony programmers.