Sarcasms (2015)
Shostakovich — Alexander Sitnikov
“The titles of Coonan's pieces include hints of their starting points…Prokofiev and Shostakovich in the case of Sarcasms. What is most striking, however, is the connection he clearly feels with the orchestra as a medium of expression – and also his confidence in handling it.”
— The Irish Times
four orchestral pieces [16’]
written for the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and the London Symphony Orchestra
instrumentation
3(III=picc).3(III=ca).3(III=bcl).3(III=cbn) / 4.3.3.1 / perc (3 players — 1: vib (with bow), glock, susp.cym; 2: vibraslap, large bdm, 3 toms, tblocks; 3: tbells, crot, mounted set of 3 wdblocks & cbells) / hrp / pno / strings (14.12.10.8.6)
details
commissioned by RTÉ (Radió Teilifís Éireann) for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland — the first piece, ’Romance’, was originally written for the London Symphony Orchestra as part of the Panufnik Young Composers Scheme, supported by the Helen Hamlyn Trust; recorded by the LSO with conductor François Xavier Roth, at the Jerwood Hall, LSO St Luke’s, London, on April 11, 2013 — first performed by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and Gavin Maloney (conductor), as part of the RTÉ NSO Horizons Series 2015, on Tuesday January 20, 2015, at the National Concert Hall, Dublin and later broadcast on RTÉ Lyric fm Nova, January 25, 2015
links
audio
I. Romance: brutal, incisive, and with intense lyricism
II. very slow: broad and expansive
III. Humoreske: prest, capricious, molto serioso
IV. presto: capricious, volatile, and full of forward-driving energy
The music of Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich provides departure points for these four orchestral pieces, which take their collective title from the former’s Sarcasms Op.17: a collection of short solo piano pieces composed 1912–1914. There’s a double-sided quality to the music of these two Soviet-era composers I find beguiling: characterised by a tendency towards irony, along with a peculiar strain of sardonic wit, their works are often open to dual readings — music that appears to adhere to the societal expectations of the day may, from a certain perspective, be understood as a subtle subversion of them.
These four orchestral pieces could be understood as an attempt at reimagining, in my own terms, those double-sided qualities of Prokofiev and Shostakovich: familiar gestures and orchestral colours are cast in angular, dissonant, and deceptively distorted guises, where nineteenth-century idioms and forms, laden with sardonicism, become dissociated.
In Russian literary criticism the yurodivy (‘holy fool’) is the figure who flouts the conventions of accepted life and, in doing so, serves as a foil to the normalities of society at large, often with the purpose of challenging or mocking them. It’s a term that’s been applied to a number of Russian Orthodox saints, as well as figures from the novels of Gogol and Dostoyevsky, and one I find apt when thinking about works of the two aforementioned composers. Theirs is music that appears to be saying one thing but could in fact be taken as saying something else.
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