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Charles Wuorinen’s staggeringly prolific output has been remarkably consistent yet tremendously varied. This disc presents the first commercial recordings of three recent pieces, together with the First String Quartet, a watershed work in the composer’s career. Wuorinen’s personal musical language is unabashedly modernist yet imbued with a love of early polyphony, and makes virtuosic demands on the performers. This spritely, sometimes elusive, often ‘maximalist’ music invites multiple interpretations and hearings to reveal the riches deep beneath its sparkling, ever-shifting surface.
Charles Wuorinen: Scherzo
Scherzo
Charles Wuorinen: String Quartet No. 1
I. quarter note = 60
II. [stesso tempo]
III. quarter note = 60, Allegramente
Charles Wuorinen: Viola Variations
Viola Variations
Charles Wuorinen: Piano Quintet No. 2
I. quarter note = 120
II. quarter note = 60-64
III. half note = 96 (quarter note = 192)
IV.
III. (Resumed)
3rd April 2011
****
“In contrast to the city’s minimalists, Wuorinen is a New York maximalist, a consummate wielder of rich, relentless polyphony, complex and speedily rhythmic textures, able to show each time that high modernism is not only alive and kicking, but a very emblem of the vigour of living.”
31st March 2011
*****
“It's his chamber music...that shows his dense, busy language at its most powerful, and the two works here...show its expressive range and the formal ingenuity with which Wuorinen deploys it...The ensemble pieces are paired with substantial solo works – the Scherzo for piano, dashingly well played by Peter Serklin, and the impressive Viola Variations, which Lois Martin turns into a tour de force.”
Scherzo
