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Rating: 'Round about Mozart
Tradition and innovation, a pair that expresses the inner contrast between two primary artistic needs. A pair we find alive and pulsating in this album by the Uri Caine Ensemble, dedicated to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and recorded by Winter & Winter in 2006 for the 250th anniversary of his birth. An homage, then, but not a canonical one, rather an anomalous and irreverent one. The composer's music is not simply performed, but strongly transfigured through an unusual and innovative approach, involving its distortion and integration with improvised sound fragments, thus enhancing a form of absolute expressive freedom with the sole aim of offering the listener a pleasure of musical rediscovery, which is intellectually stimulating at the same time. Betrayal, freedom, search, tension towards the creation of new suggestions. This is the realm we must consider when approaching this music in the hope of understanding it. Uri Caine, for his part, is not new to such endeavors, having already revisited the scores of Mahler, Wagner, Verdi, Schumann, Bach, and Beethoven in the past, with the same "sui generis" approach. On the other hand, his ensemble is partially new, featuring the happy addition of the Franco-Vietnamese Nguyên Lê's electric guitar, alongside Uri Caine himself (piano) with Joyce Hammann (violin), Chris Speed (clarinet), DJ Olive (turntables), Drew Gress (double bass), Jim Black (drums), and Ralph Alessi (trumpet). A quirky mini-orchestra composed of exceptional musicians who, involved in this ambitious project, appear highly inspired and literally unleashed. Let's see how.
The beginning is a deception. Caine solitarily transports us immediately to the alleys of 18th-century Vienna. The music begins playfully, brightly, announcing the lively and vital theme of the first movement of the "Piano Sonata K. 545". For a few tiny moments, one might think of an almost orthodox interpretation. However, in the space of an elusive moment, the sensations irreparably change and we begin to take off elsewhere, where classicism strangely mixes with blues cadences, swing passages, and lightning improvisations that, though always implying the main theme, manage to convey a desecrating sense of disorientation. A mild initial dizziness, sketched out solely by the piano. However, it is not the true journey, which has yet to really begin. Thus, when moving on to the second piece, one cannot help but feel a sense of absolute surprise upon learning, by reading the booklet, that it is the first movement of the famous "Symphony No. 40". The long and expansive initial digression, in fact, is at times disconcerting in its spatial beauty, entirely foreign to Mozart. Dark, deep, and fascinating, it oscillates between electronic backgrounds and the endless echo of Nguyên Lê's electric guitar, while the piano drips isolated icy sounds, with the violin merely hinting at its presence and the solitary trumpet rising for the briefest and dissonant moments. Mozart plunges into the abyss of deconstruction, stylistic conventions die, unpredictability ascends to power. When the obsessive accent of the drums arrives, almost as a warning in its crescendo that something is about to happen, the fragmented sounds slowly start to blend more and more, forming a dense sound paste that suddenly, with a naturalness seemingly alien to the context, is swept away by the violin. The wonderful melodic simplicity of the symphonic main theme is wonderfully reconstructed whole in the ensemble's reduced execution. From space, we are back on Earth. We are back in the lanes of Vienna, standing before a little orchestra that intensely, and at times with irony, plays the music of the Salzburg genius.
It seems then that these interpretations, with all their continuous jumps back and forth in time, in distorting musical forms as if reflected in a distorted mirror, have an expressive force of an allegorical nature with an orchestral vocation. And it all seems to stem from Uri Caine's infinite intellectual curiosity, flaunting a sincere, pure, crystalline passion for transporting innovation into the music of the past.
The reinterpretation of the second movement of the "Symphony No. 41" arrives. From the initial melodic certainties, the development ventures into sonorous tangles where the unexpected breathes, like the incredible boldness of the "Mozartian" sound of the electric guitar, a sort of space-time paradox, which makes one wonder what Amadeus might have composed for this instrument, had he only had it available. The fourth movement of the "Clarinet Quintet", instead, unfolds charmingly, sieving Mozart's cheerfulness through an extravagant divertissement. It is a moment of detachment that lightens the listening burden, darkened by previous passages, becoming the best prelude to the next sweet and melancholic piece, connected to the album's incipit. It's the second movement of the "Piano Sonata K. 545", which Caine interprets by integrating and highlighting the pre-romantic value inherent in various moments of the Austrian composer's piano writing. In the third movement of the "Sinfonia Concertante", instead, the slight lightheartedness expressed in unison by the Ensemble returns, but they do not fail to "pollute it" by enthusiastically adding schizophrenic and jarring brushstrokes.
At this point, Caine's homage turns to two wonderful operatic works of Amadeus: "Don Giovanni" and "The Magic Flute". The first transposition concerns a famous aria of Zerlina - "Batti, batti o bel Masetto" - rendered through a simple instrumental form, which does not betray the original spirit of the music, at least initially. In fact, in the final development, the group goes completely off the rails, gradually distancing from the initial context to outline a real pandemonium, an ordered chaos of sounds, that seem to splatter from everywhere, in a wealth of impulses and colors that accentuate a splendid sense of madness. As for "The Magic Flute", Caine decides to create a sort of medley with the duet "Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen" and the stunning aria of the Queen of the Night "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen". Thus proceeds a flow of sounds that alternates between the fantastic and the grotesque, crafted with a broad theatrical scope, electronic jumps, and piano sparks everywhere, along with strokes of violin that truly seem to redesign the queen of the night in all her magnificence.
Before the conclusion, the umpteenth experiment is represented by the "Rondo alla turca" from the "Piano Sonata K. 331". This is characterized by the happy intuition of entrusting the Oriental-sounding tunes to the sinuous clarinet of Chris Speed, wound around a joyful and lively crescendo, once again making the frenzied electric guitar of Nguyên Lê a co-protagonist, alternating with Ralph Alessi's brilliant trumpet. Just like the opening, the closing of the album is entrusted again to Caine's solo piano with a reading, typically torrential and dynamic, of the third movement of the "Piano Sonata K. 545". Caine climbs fearlessly along Mozart's arduous chords, daring once more to change them, distort them to achieve different perspectives, up to that point perhaps unthinkable.
Unthinkable? Perhaps at the end, this is the most suitable adjective to summarize the nature of this work, born only thanks to the keen perseverance and curiosity of a unique artist in today's landscape of musical experimentation, one of the few today capable of leaving a truly significant mark on each of his projects. Having the chance today to listen to him is a small privilege, denying oneself would be a mistake.
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