ROREM: THREE SYMPHONIES; BOURNEMOUTH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/JOSE SEREBRIER (NAXOS). ROREM: CHAMBER MUSIC; FIBONACCI SEQUENCE (NAXOS) - The classical music world thinks of Ned Rorem as the pre-eminent American composer of art songs. But a larger public thinks of him as a writer who has recorded his life and times in unflinchingly candid prose. His published diaries cover everything from bathhouse sex to a mescaline trip in the Poconos to who said what to whom at a dinner party. The latest diary, Lies, tells the harrowing chronicle of the death from AIDS of Rorem's partner, the organist and composer James Holmes.
A Ned Rorem Reader, from Yale University Press, is a good cross-section of his writing, including deft assessments of Poulenc, Stravinsky, Ravel and the Beatles. In a way, he has been undervalued as a composer because of his literary talent. But as he puts it, "I am a composer who also writes, not a writer who also composes."
To my way of thinking, two indispensable Rorem CDs are of the songs: mezzo-soprano Susan Graham's recital for Erato; and War Scenes, his song cycle based on Walt Whitman's antiwar poems, performed by baritone Donald Gramm and pianist Eugene Istomin on the Phoenix label.
While Rorem the composer will be remembered most for his songs, he has also written widely in other genres, including symphonies, concertos, chamber music, choral works, operas and ballets. He won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral suite Air Music. Now Naxos has released a pair of well-performed discs of his instrumental music.
Rorem, who turned 80 in October, lived in Paris from 1949 to 1958, and his Third Symphony relates to those days. The composer has said he was "actively sad" when he wrote the five-movement piece as he prepared to move back to the United States; the slow fourth movement constitutes "a farewell to France."
His first three symphonies, played by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Jose Serebrier, are all from the '50s, and they are something of a discovery, blissfully listenable in a sweet, romantic sort of way, with a very high level of craftsmanship in the orchestration.
Of the chamber pieces, performed by the British ensemble Fibonacci Sequence, the most enjoyable is Bright Music (1987), a suite for flute, two violins, cello and piano. The five movements, Rorem says, were inspired by typically eclectic sources, including Picasso's blue period, a Chopin sonata and a Fandango based on the image of "a rat inside a can." A
