Pintscher - Bereshit; Uriel; Songs

The Guardian 60

Couturier/Vassilakis/Hughes/Ensemble Intercontemporain/Pintscher
(Alpha)

Matthias Pintscher is now in his mid-40s, with a highly successful career as a conductor running in parallel with his prolific work as a composer. He’s currently music director of the Ensemble InterContemporain and artist-in-association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, but his twin activites often seem to reinforce each other, and it’s with the EIC that Pintscher has recorded these three works composed between 2009 and 2012, each with links to Jewish culture.

Bereshit for Large Ensemble – the title employs a Hebrew word from the Torah for “beginning” – traces out a creation myth of sorts, beginning in the depths and tracing out a half-hour arc by steady accretion and mounting activity, virtuosically scored and played, until it more or less returns to where it began. The ruminative Uriel, for cello and piano, shares its title not only with the angel who expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, but with a painting by the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman, while Songs from Solomon’s Garden sets the Hebrew texts for baritone more as chant than true song, with a chamber orchestra providing the dramatic backdrop. It’s all very accomplished, all very well “heard”; how substantial this slick music is, though, is harder to say.