レオン・キルヒナー: 管弦楽作品集

アメリカ随一の厳格な現代音楽作曲家
レオン・キルヒナー作品集!

レオン・キルヒナーはUCLAでシェーンベルクに師事、その後ニューヨークでロジャー・セッションズ、エルネスト・ブロッホに学び、アメリカにおける12音技法の指導的な作曲家と位置付けられている。「中国のニクソン」で知られるジョン・アダムズもかつて彼に師事していた。キルヒナーの作風はいずれも12音技法を基本とした厳格なものでシェーンベルク、ベルクの影響が色濃い。晩年まで創作の手を緩めず死の前年に書かれた「禁忌」には厳しい表現主義様式の中にも抒情性が感じられ、そういったロマン的な情感をそれまで「禁忌」として自ら封じ込めてきた作曲家の偽らざる生の声が聴きとれる。
東武ランドシステム

American composer Leon Kirchner was a student of Arnold Schoenberg, though he did not use the 12-tone system or other strict organizational methods, and favored a generally dissonant and free atonal style with ambiguous tonal inflections. As a result, his music more closely resembles the flexible approach of Alban Berg, and the orchestral music on this 2018 release from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project bears this out. Kirchner was no avant-garde dogmatist, and his music was liberated from the "rule of the row," total serialism, aleatoric operations, and later experimental fads. While keeping his music out of the so-called "international style" of the mid-20th century, Kirchner let his ideas develop by their own logic, not some arbitrary technique, yet permitted his melodies and harmonies to hint at tonality without being reactionary. The titles on this program suggest abstraction rather than any programmatic intent, and the Sinfonia in Two Parts (1951), the Toccata for strings, solo winds and percussion (1955), Music for Orchestra (1969), and Orchestra Piece (Music for Orchestra II) (1990) must be taken as pure concert music in a serious vein, with inventive dissonant counterpoint as the modus operandi and expressionism coloring the style. Only The Forbidden (2008), Kirchner's final composition, suggests a hidden story, though in this case, the music's references to a highly chromatic, post-Romantic tonality imply the title's most likely meaning. Gil Rose leads the BMOP in solid and committed performances, and considering the scarcity of recordings of Kirchner's works, this 2018 release may well be considered authoritative, judged by the convincing way these pieces are performed.