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Lukas Foss
Complete Symphonies.
Boston Modern Orchestra Project, $35.99
Lukas Foss was one of our most adventuresome composers. He was born in Berlin in 1922 to a Jewish family, which moved to Paris in 1933, and then to America in 1937, to escape the Nazi threat. He was a prodigious piano and compositional talent at a young age. Foss was to become the pianist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra during his early years, a professor at ucla and Boston University, the conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and the Jerusalem and Milwaukee Symphonies, and an elegant speaker about music.
Like his friend Leonard Bernstein, he made his mark in three areas: piano, composition, and conducting. Though he never rivaled Bernstein in popularity, Foss is the more interesting and accomplished composer. Where Lukas had a smaller stage, Bernstein had a grand one. Their desires to be everything to everyone left something to be desired. Where Bernstein seemed to find salvation in conducting, Foss found salvation in composition. Both men suffered from doing too much, spreading themselves far too thin. Both men were so busy they didn't have sufficient time to sit in undisturbed silence to write the music they might have written. Having said this, they still must have led the musical lives they wished. Money aside, they could have done what Esa-Pekka Salonen has now done: step out of the limelight of conducting (sort of) and retreat to the quiet of the studio, where there is no publicity person, no orchestral manager: only you and the music waiting to be written.
Bernstein and Foss lived through the musical and cultural chaos of the Sixties and Seventies. Foss looked at these new approaches early on and engaged them with excitement and verve. His became not so much a style as a poly-stylistic approach to music. Early on he was a neo-classicist as a result of his work with Copland at Tanglewood (Symphony No. 1). Later he explored improvisation with his ensemble at ucla (Echoi) and also tried on dodecaphonism and aleatoricism (Time Cycle), collage (Baroque Variations), minimalism (in a piece written for my ensemble Musical Elements, Embros) and others. About this extensive musical approach, Foss said: "The more influences, the richer our vocabulary," followed...