"Orchestral Music by Frank Lewin" (Albany Records)
By Michael Redmond Lifestyle Editor
Over the transom, as it were, has come a new CD, “Orchestral Music by Frank Lewin” (Albany Records), passed along by TIMEOFF’s Anthony Stoeckert, who had recalled the pleasure I found listening to a previous release, “Film Music by Frank Lewin,” which Anthony had written about last year.
I’ve since spent several hours listening to Mr. Lewin’s new CD, which, if you think about it, is pretty much the kind of attention one should pay to new music that succeeds initially in catching and holding one’s attention.
Huh? Why should this be so? We don’t have to listen that hard, after all, if we’re hearing one of Beethoven’s symphonies, say, for the first time — but one of Beethoven’s contemporaries might have had to spend a lot of time going over that score, wondering to himself, just what the dickens is Ludwig up to? Because the music in question would have been genuinely new at the time, and a departure in various respects from the Haydn-Mozart symphonic conventions a contemporary of Beethoven would have been accustomed to.
But, even the first time around, we don’t have to do that kind of hard listening to Beethoven. Given the passage of 200 years, even the most casual exposure to symphonic music — film scores, for instance, or the ubiquitous “Christmas specials” that put some pop personality in front of an orchestra — arrives with all the Haydn-Mozart- Beethoven conventions already hard-wired into our listening circuits.
Well, this is not the case with new music and never has been. With “La Mer” (1905), for example — that drop-dead gorgeous orchestral showpiece, a favorite of audiences everywhere — Claude Debussy introduced a sea change (pun alert) in form, syntax and sonority, and was rewarded for his pains by outrage and scorn. It’s a famous story and a cautionary tale. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic lined up to bash “La Mer” as “a putrified mud-puddle,” “unintelligible,” “persistently ugly,” “a dissonant jumble” and “the dreariest kind of rubbish.” These writers were neither inexperienced nor unsophisticated — they were, in fact, among the most refined and perceptive ears in their society. Except that they had never heard such music before.
Well, Frank Lewin has never claimed a place at the same table as Debussy, as far as I know, and he certainly wasn’t mounting anything like such a radical challenge to listeners’ expectations when he was composing his Concerto on Silesian Tunes (1966) and Concerto Armonico (1962). These stand very much in the wake of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra (1943), one of that composer’s most accessible pieces, and they also reveal some echoes of Roy Harris and Paul Hindemith, with whom Mr. Lewin once studied.
In other words, there’s nothing here to frighten the children. Still, there’s enough here, one fears, to disconcert (there I go again) certain symphony subscribers — the first time out, anyway — and that’s really a pity. Because these concertos are outstanding achievements of their time and place, and they deserve a niche in the repertory — particularly that for viola and orchestra, which, frankly, can use some beefing up.
Ah, the equable viola, long thought of as the Rodney Dangerfield of string instruments (“I don’t get no respect”), close cousin to that prima donna, the violin, and that distinguished character actor, the cello — but almost never cast in a starring role.
Well, this sorry situation provides superb violists like Brett Deubner with the motivation, no doubt, to go out and find good pieces, whether old or new, and it appears from this CD’s program notes that something like this happened has here.
But it gets even more interesting. Having recorded the Silesian concerto (more below), Mr. Deubner asked whether Mr. Lewin had anything else — and out came the Concerto Armonico, originally scored for four-octave chromatic harmonica, of all things. Mr. Deubner proceeded to adapt the harmonica part for viola. The measure of his success can be taken by the fact that having heard the adaptation, I simply cannot imagine the piece with any solo instrument other than Mr. Deubner’s.
A longtime resident of Princeton, Mr. Lewin was born in 1925 in what was then Breslau, in German Silesia, and is now Wroclaw, in Polish Silesia. This was once a dangerous neighborhood in a murderous time, let it not be forgotten.
One makes connections between a composer’s life and his work only at peril, but it seems safe to speculate that the receipt of several Silesian songs — all German songs, by the way — moved Mr. Lewin to pour out music of astonishing eloquence and abundant wit.
The heart of this four-movement concerto is a lengthy slow movement — a lament, certainly, brimming with love and grief — but the piece is, on the whole, cheerful, sparkling, playful. There are even instances of laugh-out-loud fun. The tunes serve as a grounding for the piece, but it is by no means a folkloric exercise. I would think that Mr. Deubner’s peer violists would mortgage the house to get their hands on this score.
The Concerto Armonico, also in four movements, is of a more serious and abstract character, rich in events, and of such weight and scope that it could serve, I suppose, in lieu of the symphony that Mr. Lewin has apparently never gotten around to writing. It’s a tough piece that rewards the diligent listener. Mr. Deubner made brilliant work of a very demanding part.
The CD also contains an attractive performance of a “symphonic sketch” titled “Evocation,” some 15 minutes in duration, premiered in Princeton in 1960. It’s a nice piece of Americana, but it somehow fails to hold together as a coherent statement. Or so it seems to this listener.
It should be noted that Mr. Lewin is well known as the composer of the opera “Burning Bright,” based on the John Steinbeck drama. For a while there, back in the ‘90s, “Burning Bright” was pretty widely known as the most famous American opera nobody had ever heard, based on some big buzz generated by a Yale University production in 1993, with attendant publicity and cassette tapes in circulation. The late, lamented Opera Festival of New Jersey finally did right by Mr. Lewin with a McCarter Theatre staging in 2000. “Burning Bright” is also an Albany CD.
“Orchestral Music by Frank Lewin” features the New Symphony Orchestra of Sofia, Bulgaria, in distinctive, assured performances under the direction of Rossen Milanov, associate conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and music director of New Jersey’s Haddonfield Symphony. Maestro, mnogo blagordaya. Ladies and gentlemen, take a bow.
This CD leads one to wonder, yet again, whether any mediocre musicians exist in the former Eastern bloc. I mean, they’ve got to have lots of them, right — but perhaps they hide them especially well?
On the Web: http://members.aol.com/franklewin/www.brettdeubner.comwww.albanyrecords.com.

