If justice prevails, this CRI disc of songs, solo piano music and a violin sonata will change that. As usual, CRI's sound and documentation are exemplary. These would have astounded admirers of the iconoclastic young composer but one of them, the Variations for Orchestra, is a masterpiece. Seattle's New Performance Group gives sensitive and assured performances of this challenging music. First impressions of Chaitkin's music dwell on an abundance of allure of an often delicate quality.
Further hearings reveal it to reside within remarkably sturdy yet self-effacing architecture.
This is some of the mostly gently intentioned music I've heard in a long while. To go on performing and recording Harry Partch's music is all very well, but his distinctive blend of energy and dolefulness, heroic myth and autobiography, new tones and ancient ways survives best on the tapes he made himself with colleagues between 1950 and his death in 1974. Happily these have been rereleased by CRI on four CD's as The Harry Partch Collection. As in so much Partch, pulsed rhythm and brilliant tone colors go along with off-tuning and dragging glissandos, as if the music were smiling and yawning at the same time. The music of this American aboriginal will shake you, gently, back to your roots.