These are the most interesting pieces by Aribert Reimann that I have yet heard. His music is often expressionistically gestural, and some other things of his have struck me as not much more than crabbedly chromatic, fragmentary lines accompanied by explosive sound effects. In Unrevealed, however, he takes a group of texts which might seem to invite a fist- and voice-brandishing manner (three poems and a letter addressed by Byron to his half-sister and lover Augusta Leigh) but sets them as a formally proportioned—though still intensely emotional—quintet for baritone voice and strings. In the piano Variations the risk would seem to be still greater, since Reimann here is exploiting the extremes of piano technique as well as those of his vociferous language, but here again a strong and ingenious structural plan protects the music from flying to pieces.
In both works, in fact, Reimann has his cake and eats it. The febrile emotions behind Byron's words are pretext enough for any number of striking gestures and textures, but their metres are strict and their diction (if you consider that remembered incest and the pain of forcible separation are their subject matter) is often curiously formal, and this seems to have given Reimann a pretext, both for an easily legible patterning of varied reprise and recurrence as well as for some pages of grateful, voice-flattering plangent lyricism (quite recalling Britten at one or two moments), amid the bitter vehemence which is the work's predominant tone of voice. It is characteristic of the piece that the angular pizzicato chatterings and forceful single notes that cluster round the (speaking) voice in the third movement should congeal into a harsh and long-held chord, but that this should culminate not in violent gestures but in a chordal recitative of considerable passionate eloquence.
The Variations, apparently, are pretty strictly serial, but their satisfying unity is as much due to Reimann's ability to invent memorable sound images, which are then quite audibly repeated and varied, as to any arcane use of retrogrades and inversions. He seems, too, at least as interested in providing challenges to the pianist as in solving those he has set himself, and the pill of his rigorous working-out (which has its own rather exhausting exhilaration) is abundantly sugared by excitingly showy pianistic gestures.
Both works are quite brilliantly performed. Salter (a fine English baritone now working in Germany) sings the Byron poems with great beauty of tone as well as fierce urgency, and the Kreuzberger Quartet are eloquent and accomplished partners. Levine plays the Variations with the steel-fingered command that he would bring to, say, the Copland Variations. A clean, direct and natural recording.'