Reviews of Oculus, Kurt Rohde
From the Grammophone
February 2005
By Arved Ashby
Energetic, impeccable, beautifully recorded accounts of 'brilliant' music.
These three pieces, each of them scored for strings, offer a stunning display of a formidable compositional imagination. Kurt Rohde is young, but no slave to fashion. You could even say there's something charmingly old-fashioned about his language, which share an anxious and sinuous ambiguity of harmony with Berg, Nicholas Maw, Frank Martin and Britten in his more exploratory vein. Rohde's is a rare muse in that the idiom is original but not prickly or pretentious, the vocabulary not obviously tonal yet at the same time consistently anchored.
Lest this makes him sound like a compromiser, let it be said that Rohde is master of his compositional worlds, and each score loses no time in carving out its own course. The music is skittery, conflicted, self-doubting, peripatetic. It plays host to gestures and riffs rather than melodies. Yet the lines of action are tightly drawn, and the eight movements of Oculus (for string orchestra) trace a sure arc over their 30 minute span. The fifth, Stretto, artfully weaves in a quote from The Rite of Spring before we land in the oasis-like Cenotaph movement with its sense of deep, well-deserved inhalation.
So Oculus covers itself in brilliance. By contrast, Minerva's Pools with its pedal points and slow harmonic shift is a darker, more elusive score.
I only wish this composer's precise conception of each musical cameo were surer still: each piece offer an individual landscape, but by comparison each individual number of Britten's Frank Bridge Variations and Maw's Life Studies springs to life immediately, like a portrait of a favorite relative. Perhaps Rohde could do more to particularize his own set of harmonic likes and dislikes, to polemicize in chords. His unfailingly idiomatic and enterprising writing for strings, however, does much to catch the ear: this composer is obviously a string player himself.
Rohde is composer in residence for the New Century group, and also director of San Francisco's Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. I see here he has been working with Kent Nagano on several large scale projects, including an opera. Here's hoping Mondovibe let's us hear them. In the meantime, the New Century Chamber Orchestra's energetic, impeccable and beautifully recorded performances will go a long way in converting you to his cause.
From Symphony Magazine
November/December 2004
By Melinda Whiting
New Discs of Note
Kurt Rohde: Oculus
New Century Chamber Orchestra
Monodvibe Enhanced CD
Looking for calm, sweet, restful contemporary music? Kurt Rohde is not your guy. By the evidence of the two works for string orchestra on his CD debut, this young composer leans toward an uneasily contemplative frame of mind, punctuated with anxious bursts of activity that seem to exhaust themselves, unresolved. Rohde's music is compelling, nonetheless, with an assured structural logic and a curious immediacy that could be called relevance. Hard to pin down, the origin of this quality is not so obvious as the pop-music references that will soon date the music of some of his contemporaries. There are musical allusions - to Stravinsky in the "Litanies" movement of "Oculus" - but these in no way interfere with Rohde's distinctive personal voice, which is based in tonality, but never trite. His confidence in writing for strings is striking, as he layers middle-voiced drones, enervated lyrical voices, and siren-like glissandi with scattered, disembodied pizzicati. He even calls upon the players to sing, producing an eerie sound not immediately identifiable as human. The nine miniatures of "Oculus" come off better, overall, than the continuous, 25 minute long "Minerva's Pools", which seems to loose its momentum halfway through. Keeping Rohde's skittish, intricate textures together must have been no small task for the Bay Area's conductor-less New Century Chamber Orchestra. Their precision rarely flags; their commitment, never.
From the San Jose Mercury News
June 28, 2004
By Richard Scheinin
Kurt Rohde's music is filled with exhilaration and dread. It's a mirror of our times, and its performance by the Bay Area's New Century Chamber Orchestra will make you clench the armrests of your seat.
It's dark music, lit up by peckings, clackings, snaps and slides. It sounds eerie, but lyrical; sustained, but skittish; free-form, yet dancing. Strings are plucked, thumped and softly rubbed. Low drones underlie high flickers of melody. There's a lot going on at once - it's music as multi-tasking, tightly and emotionally played by this excellent orchestra, which has no conductor and learns all pieces collaboratively.
From San Francisco Classical Voice
July 20, 2004
By Robert Commanday
Music for a Summer Evening - new CDs
CD Review
New Century's Kurt Rohde Disc
Along comes the New Century Chamber Orchestra with Oculus (Mondovibe), a CD devoted to string pieces by Kurt Rohde, its composer-in-residence (also director of San Francisco's Left Coast Chamber Ensemble). Rohde’s music is of the harmonically gentler, more available language that has appealed to the generations following that of Davidovsky and Peterson. His own viola experience comes through in the idiomatic writing for this string ensemble, not much of the 'experimental' or advanced playing techniques and colorist character. The first piece, Oculus, is most successful, a set of eight pieces ranging from 1:17 ("Epigram") to 7:10 ("Cenotaph") in length.
The music pursues single paths in each vignette. The effect of the whole is something like that of a modern dance in 8 scenes. Rohde’s ideas are often brief, splashes of color (the motive initiating "Echoes") leading in unexpected directions, but the recurring references to the motives hold things together. No. 3, "Litanies," seems to launch an iconic Sacre de Printemps motif (the horns’ chugging rhythm on one chord in the Stravinsky, a deliberate reference no doubt), but the working-out explores the NCCO’s sonorous voice. It is Rohde's habit or manner to drop into unison passages regularly, too frequently. Although this simplifies listening, it breaks any momentum the counterpoint may have developed and the piece loses its drive.
High rhythmic action is often anchored to slow harmonic movement, another way Rohde has of speaking directly and easily, which these pieces do. "Cenotaph" for example, is a solo violin elegy over sustained chords.
Arresting sonorities, contrasts
Three Fantasy Pieces, for viola, cello and double bass (1999-2000), explores this dark and different combination, finding in single succession, arresting sonorities and contrasts, ("AbruptFragments"), a haunting cello solo; restless trio and dark viola soliloquy for "Solstice," and for "rush" a nervous, tremulous motion, sounding conspiratorial and fitful. It is action but not movement.
The third and largest work, Minerva's Pools, starts in a mood of mystery and remains a mystery for its more than 24-minute length. You know clearly what Rohde is doing at any moment; the sound, the sonorities and textures arrest the attention, but never where he's going. I get no feeling of any determined movement towards a goal, no sense of large line or structure, no cohesion, just hand over hand episodes, or so it seems. As controlled and inventive as Minerva's Pools sounds while unfolding, it becomes evident that not enough is happening in the music to take it anywhere. That is not the fault of the playing of the New Century Chamber Orchestra, as regular readers and Bay Area patrons would know. The 17 string players, under concertmaster Krista Bennion Feeney, are crack musicians and their performing is first rate, the frequent solos excellent, richly sonorous and expressive. As a reminder, this is a conductorless group, but I am given to understand that some of the sessions for this called upon a leader at the podium.