Composer: Leo Ornstein (11 December 189? – 24 February 2002)
Ornstein’s exact date of birth is ambiguous, with various sources stating dates in 1892, 1893 or 1895, but official documents from 1917, 1920 and 1942 suggest a December 11, 1895 birthdate. Some biography websites and the end of the final source video say 1893.
Work Title: Piano Quintet, Op.92; SO 610
Performers: Marc-André Hamelin (piano), Mark Fewer (violin), Scott St. John (violin), Douglas McNabney (viola), Denise Djokic (cello).
0:05 – I. Allegro barbaro
13:29 – II. Andante lamentoso
23:56 – III. Allegro agitato
Leo Ornstein was a leading American experimental composer and pianist of the early twentieth century. His performances of works by avant-garde composers and his own innovative and even shocking pieces made him a cause célèbre on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ornstein was the first important composer to make extensive use of the tone cluster. As a pianist, he was considered a world-class talent. By the mid-1920s, he had walked away from his fame and soon disappeared from popular memory. Though he gave his last public concert before the age of forty, he continued writing music for another half-century and beyond. Largely forgotten for decades, he was rediscovered in the mid-1970s. Ornstein completed his eighth and final piano sonata in September 1990 at the age of ninety-four, making him the oldest published composer in history (a mark since passed by Elliott Carter).
If Ornstein’s music is so little known, it’s because for much of his life he wanted it that way. The son of a Jewish cantor in Ukraine, Ornstein was born in 1893. Soon after moving to New York in 1906, he rose to fame as a pianist of enormous technical gifts. Over the next decade he also gained notoriety as a composer of spiky Modernist works with titles like “Danse Sauvage” that featured pounding, complex rhythms and piercing cluster chords. But over the course of the 1920s he began to turn his back on performing and then dedicated himself to composing in private for some time in a trailer in Texas until his death in Wisconsin (at 108) in 2002.
The monumental piano quintet, running close to 40 minutes, creates an idiosyncratic musical language that might be called Late Late Romanticism. The folk motifs of the first movement (Allegro barbaro) are quarried from the same Russian soil as those used by Stravinsky in “The Rite of Spring” and are propelled by similar irregular rhythms. But the fluid and expressive development of this material echoes the late Romantic chamber music of French composers like Ravel and Fauré. “Fluid” is perhaps an odd word to use for a movement that includes violent changes of temperament and rudely interrupted phrases, but Ornstein’s sense of narrative is supremely assured.
In the heart-stoppingly beautiful Andante lamentoso, a seductive modal melody rises above a tender piano accompaniment. Passed from one string player to the next, the melody is cocooned by gauzy dissonances created by the remaining three quartet members.
A rustic dance — the thick-soled shoe kind — introduces the third movement, in which quiet melancholic moments give way to punishing rhythms and sudden harmonic U-turns. At the end, the work appears to head for a conciliatory resolution until one final downward chord change on the piano leaves it dangling like a window shutter with a broken hinge.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Ornstein
Source videos:
1st movement – https://youtu.be/ijhDi-PDfLk
2nd movement – https://youtu.be/jy1MeGhoIEg
3rd movement – https://youtu.be/oOQ7JvdzWig