Symphony No. 3 ...
Steve Schwartz, writing at www.classicalcdreview.com, wrote as follows:
"Benjamin Lees' concertos have tended to crowd out his symphonies from public attention. I remember only the release during the LP era of the Symphony No. 2 by Robert Whitney and the Louisville Orchestra. The appearance of the Symphony No. 4 'Memorial Candles' on Naxos with Kuchar and the Ukrainians -- a strong work in a very good performance indeed -- has created some anticipation for this release. All of the Lees symphonies, excepting the first, are now available on CD.
"Lees works in a classic modern idiom, although in an individual way. He shouldn't give a listener any more fits than Piston, Diamond, or Mennin. Lees's instinct for drama and conflict help make him a fantastic concerto writer and a symphonist of at least more than passing interest. If you analyze the music, you find links to the post-Beethoven symphonic tradition, but the similarities function more as analogies than anything else.
"Lees' shapes are fantastic, in the sense of odd. While one can (and Lees does) talk of near-sonata form, one almost always finds the architecture subservient to a rhetorical or dramatic pattern. Nevertheless, no matter how unusual the result, one always gets the impression of great coherence in a Lees work.
"The Symphony No. 3 premiered in 1969. Of all the works by Lees I've heard, this comes closest to the label 'surrealist' (for many years, the label critics liked to apply to Lees's work). Indeed, most of the time, Lees seems to me the opposite of surrealist, in that his works cohere so logically. In his liner notes to the recording, the composer writes that with this symphony he consciously strove to create something new, more 'relevant' to a world of computers, satellites and space exploration. Whether that world would care about symphonies and whether, in the words of 'As Time Goes By,' 'moonlight and love songs are never out of date' are, of course, other questions that we robably shouldn't argue about here. The point is that Lees thought this at the time of writing, and the symphony counts as one of his formally 'farthest out.' Three movements -- fast-scherzo-slow -- follow three 'interludes' (as Lees designates them) for solo tenor sax and temple blocks. As I listened, the words of Yeats kept coming to mind: 'Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.' Of course, those words occur in a very tightly-controlled sonnet. In the movements proper, Lees deals with fragments and episodes with, as far as I can hear and unlike his second symphony, very little in common. It reminded me, in a strange way, of Sibelius's second, where the composer seems to lay out random pieces of colored glass and then makes patterns from them. The pieces have distinct shapes (I think immediately of an upward leap of a minor ninth that opens the first movement proper), but Lees makes no attempt to integrate these ideas or to draw relations among them, as he does in his second. Contrast is the main note here. A lot of wonderful things happen in this symphony (for example, a string glissando passage where the players divide into thirteen parts, a phantasmal, almost 'toneless' scurrying in the strings that opens the scherzo), but a continuous argumentative thread doesn't seem anywhere about. Lees tries to keep things from disintegration by his interludes, which play with the same idea -- so arresting in itself and in its tenor sax sound that you won't likely forget. As it turns out, it's a powerful bond.
"As I write the above and listen to the first movement again, it strikes me that I may have overstated my case. At one point, Lees relates the upward leap of the minor ninth to the saxophone 'fanfare' motive, and there's a contrasting downward leap of a major seventh -- sort of that idea turned on its head. The sax fanfare seems to permeate quite a bit of the movement. But one still doesn't have the sense of continuation. Instead, the listener is struck by one contrast after another almost arbitrarily, as in a dream – or, for that matter, as in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth. It's worth adding that Lees in both the second and third symphonies explore territory not all that emotionally clear-cut. There's a duality, an ambiguity, as when a dream figure speaks a language you don't know and yet you understand the talk. It's like looking at a Magritte or an Escher: the image in sharp detail sending contradictory messages.
"In the concluding slow movement, the fragmentation increases. Even the variations on the basic ideas move far from their originals, but usually not to the point of unrecognizability. However, one of them turns out to vary the sax fanfare, which I realized only after a couple of weeks of serious listening, so it's not quite so straightforward. Lees provides a 'false ending' for the symphony. The tenor sax comes in, this time prepared for, leading one to expect a quick coda. Increasingly, however, ideas from earlier movements creep in and an integration begins to take place among all the movements and the interludes. That is, the thematic argument closes off in a satisfactory way. Rhetorically, it ends in the middle, like a stairway stepping off to a powdery, emotional nowhere. Enigmatic as all get-out and as intriguing as a sidewinder."
PLEASE NOTE:
No reproductions of photos, articles, music or reviews are permitted without permission
of the Estate of Benjamin Lees.
No reproductions of photos, articles, music or reviews are permitted without permission
of the Estate of Benjamin Lees.