Aaron Jay Kernis (b 1960) has recently been receiving wide attention and frequent performances in North America. His music is tonal, often strongly rhythmic (though much of the work on the present disc is slow), colourful and dramatic. The 40-minute Cello Concerto, Colored Field (originally for cor anglais, but adapted for and dedicated to Truls Mork) is an extended meditation on the Holocaust. The title derives from a visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau when Kernis, seeing children chewing blades of grass, recalled that the ground that they sprang from was once blood-soaked. The first movement is slow, mostly lyrical (the main theme is a scalic pattern), with a distinctly Jewish tinge – florid turns and a klezmer-like duet for the soloist and a clarinet. The central movement is an angular scherzo with jazz elements, depicting the more sinister creepy-crawlies that emerged from the corners of Pandora’s box. The huge 22-minute finale alternates solemn chordal exclamations and soberly grieving melody (developed from a five-note cell), eventually returning to the Concerto’s opening. My problem with the work is that its manner implies striking melodic invention, which Kernis cannot always supply. The chordal theme of the finale is an exception, and he uses it resourcefully; the later five-note cell is skil-fully developed, but Kernis’s approachable style demands Big Tunes, and they aren’t always in stock.
Musica celestis is one of his hits – this is its third recording. A slow, rapt, unfailingly euphonious meditation ‘inspired by the music of Hildegard of Bingen’, it demands contemplative rather than alertly analytical listening (from which one might conclude that it’s rather like Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia minus the Theme of Thomas Tallis). Air does have a tune, a gently modal one, but it alternates with one of Kernis’s not-quite-tunes. Admirable performances, finely recorded