Elena Langer – Landscape with Three People
Anna Dennis; William Towers; Nicholas Daniel
harmonia mundi HMU 907669
Elena Langer, a Russian-born composer who studied in London, writes in an idiom that recalls Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition as orchestrated by Ravel; she combines a Russian folk sensibility with modern orchestral colours and a deep understanding of the resonances between text and music.
This is especially true of the title piece, a work for soprano, countertenor, oboe, harpsichord and trio of strings. Here Langer casts the poetry of Lee Harwood, a 20th-century English poet best known for being John Ashbery’s lover during the 1960s, in a baroque-inspired musical mould. There is an uneasiness in the configuration, though – the poems, dealing as they do with urban love, threaten to struggle free from the old-fashioned harmonic conventions that constrain them. Langer, delighting in this tension, exploits it to very wry effect. This is especially true of the oboe part, which, ostensibly representing the third figure in a love triangle with the soprano and countertenor, frequently seems to make stage-whispered asides to the audience, offering commentary on the action in the way only wickedly good gossip can. “This is my first love scene,” sing the soprano and countertenor, but the oboe’s acidic obbligato implies mockingly that this is neither their first nor their last “first love scene” at all. Ultimately, the oboe is subsumed by the affair, and the three figures are left to swirl in the purgatorial ambiguity of their similar tessiture. Such nuances pervade the works of this vital composer.
