Michael Boriskin, Richard Danielpour, Leonard Bernstein, Edward Smaldone, Lowell Liebermann

Apart from musical considerations, it is entirely appropriate that the work of Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) stands beside the compositions of three younger Americans on this program of recorded premieres. By example and deed, Bernstein served like no other major American artist as a true role model for at least a couple of generations of aspiring musicians in this country. Moreover, his eclecticism as a composer and performer exemplified the polyglot nature of the arts in America.

Among the composers to whom Bernstein, in his last years, gave encouragement was Richard Danielpour (b 1956). Danielpour's music is expressively urgent and unconstrained, and instrumentally flamboyant; harmonically wide-ranging, it rarely strays long from a tonal anchor. Much of his work is concerned with psychological journeys, which are often made explicit through titles, texts, or other clear associations. In his Piano Sonata (1986), such extramusical allusions are only implied by the striking contrasts and highly charged atmosphere. The duality embodied in the piece recurs frequently in his music: light and dark (in both the coloristic and metaphysical senses), outer and inner emotions, and public and private lives are represented by music that is exuberant and ruminative.

Over the course of a protean career, Bernstein composed twenty-nine musical vignettes, which were published in four collections called Anniversaries. Three sets, containing sixteen works in all, were issued between 1943 and 1954; the remaining thirteen pieces, written at various times from 1964 to 1988, appeared in 1989. Like their predecessors, the compositions in Thirteen Anniversaries are simply designed, modestly scaled, and generally intimate. Some of the pieces display considerable richness and expressive power, despite their reserve, while others are witty and gently playful. Bernstein's art, often as extravagant and colorful as its creator, is distilled here to a purity that is at once disarming, genuine, and affecting.

The music of Edward Smaldone (b 1956) deftly combines a jazz-inflected vocabulary with certain Schoenbergian principles (especially from the pre-serial, "free atonal" period). In the etudes Smaldone composed for me in 1990, four colorful, semi-abstract paintings by a New York artist, Irving Abram, are transformed into a musical idiom. The four pieces are framed by the coruscating Introduction and an identical, but muted, Epilogue, which reinterpret Chopin's pioneering C Major Etude, Opus 10, No. 1.

An avid student of art and architecture, Lowell Liebermann (b 1961) has long been intrigued by the strange, ornate carvings called gargoyles, which embellish many old churches and palaces; often exceedingly bizarre in appearance, they were thought to help repel evil spirits. Demons seem to hover around Liebermann's own Gargoyles (1989), a set of four highly contrasted etudes, which maintains an eerieness and sense of mystery even in its more placid moments. Liebermann unabashedly looks back to the Romantic era, simultaneously remodeling the idiom and reveling in its conventions. — Michael Boriskin