Mozart 252

We Say...

Review by John Schaefer

If you are already a Michael Nyman fan, you can skip all this and just start downloading any tracks you don’t already have (if you own the soundtrack to the Peter Greenaway film Drowning By Numbers, you won’t need tracks 3-8). If you’ve come here following the trail of Mozart, though, read on.

These days, Nyman is best known for his film scores, including the evocative and best-selling score for the Holly Hunter film The Piano. But Michael Nyman is, along with Gavin Bryars, one of the founders of a distinctly British branch of minimalism. Taking a page from America’s Philip Glass and, to a lesser extent, from Steve Reich and Terry Riley, Nyman began creating splashy, rhythmic, tonal music back in the 1970s — a terribly unfashionable thing to do in “Serious Music” circles at the time. Nyman was also a critic, and has claimed to be the first to actually apply the term “Minimalism” to Glass, Reich, etc. But Nyman has also had a career-long obsession with Mozart, and this album brings together most of his Mozart-derived works. If you are a Mozart fan, you will recognize much of the thematic material here.

“in Re Don Giovanni” might have been Nyman’s first acknowledged composition. It takes a small fragment from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and weaves it into something delightfully irreverent yet still respectful. The six tracks from film Drowning By Numbers are all built around the remarkable second movement of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E Flat for violin, viola and strings. If you know that piece (eMusic has several recordings of it), you can have a fine old time watching Nyman spin his pastoral English soundscapes out of whole passages from 18th century Austria. Of the remaining works, taken from a BBC special in 1991, “Revisiting the Don” is the most immediately appealing. “Profit and Loss” and “I Am an Unusual Thing” are songs, the latter originally for the great German-American chanteuse Ute Lemper, and the former a vocal ensemble piece that highlights Nyman’s ingratiating way of writing for the voice.