Gundaris Pone – Portraits
Liepaja Symphony Orchestra; Guntis Kuzma; Normunds Sne
SKANI LMIC SKANI 161 (lmic.lv/lv/skani/catalogue?id=244)
In 1950, Latvia-born Gundaris Pone (1932-1994) moved to the U.S., studied composition and, from 1963 until his death, taught composition at the State University of New York at New Paltz, also serving as artistic director and conductor of New Paltz’s annual Music in the Mountains Festival.
Pone’s single-movement, 24-minute Avanti! (1975) features violent dissonances, funereal solemnity and bitter irony, with quotations from the 1905 Latvian revolutionary anthem, With Battle Cries on Our Lips, Berg’s Wozzeck, a lamenting Bach chorale and repeated cuckoo calls. Helping to coordinate the score’s polyrhythms, conductor Guntis Kuzma is assisted by Normunds Šnē.
Filled with exaggerated, off-kilter cinematic tropes, American Portraits (1983-1984) depicts stereotypical representations of five professions: inventor (eerie woodwinds, jagged bursts of heavy percussion); film star (jaunty, cliché cowboy sauntering); powerful financier (film-noir dramatics with pounding brass and percussion); gangster (train whistles and boisterous jazzy riffs – Pone specified “1920s style,” so conductor Kuzma added a washboard to the mix); military genius (furious fanfares and a wild, Ivesian victory-march).
Pone enjoyed extended stays in Venice, and his brilliantly orchestrated La Serenissima, Seven Venetian Portraits (1979-1981) presents kaleidoscopic imagery of a day in the city, from morning shadows to afternoon waters, evening chatter and night fog: spectral Venice, in addition to the Arch of Paradise, the mouth of the lion and a meeting with the messenger of death. I found La Serenissima’s discordant impressionism – a vividly expressive amalgam of Debussy and Alban Berg – riveting listening throughout.
