CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Revisiting a Composer’s Psychedelic Lewis Carroll Music

By Seth Colter Walls
NY Times Jan. 5, 2023

There’s the surreal image of going “through the looking glass”; the look of a Tim Burton movie, including his version of “Alice in Wonderland”; the skewed angles of Tom Petty’s video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More”; the use of a word like “galumphing.”

And, as a new album from the Albany Symphony demonstrates, there are the Carroll-inspired musical works of the composer David Del Tredici, some of which have been captured on two world premiere recordings from the ensemble, led by David Alan Miller.

These long-awaited performances — of “Pop-Pourri” (from 1968, and revised in 1973) and “Adventures Underground” (written in 1971 and revised in 1977) — are a booming, psychedelic marvel. In the initial seconds of the first movement of “Pop-Pourri,” Del Tredici smash cuts between a Bach harmonization of a Lutheran chorale, “Es Ist Genug,” and his own setting of Carroll’s text. The “Litany of the Blessed Virgin” is also in the mix — making good on Del Tredici’s claim, in the album’s liner notes, that the piece is “a kind of Cantata of the Sacred and Profane.”

But that’s not the strangest, or even most alluring, part of the beginning: That would be the music for saxophones, which tends to keen and swoon underneath high-flown writing for a soprano (on this recording, an indefatigable Hila Plitmann). The second movement features boisterous, fast moving lines for contrabassoon. And in the third movement, Del Tredici lets his late ’60s freak flag fly, with percussion blasts and woolly lines for distorted electric guitar and bass.

“I’m always trying to make the text come alive,” Del Tredici, 85, said in a recent phone interview. He remembered that, for the “Jabberwocky”-quoting third movement, “I needed something for the monster.”

..And he’s currently contemplating another opera with a comic bent about his recent experiences with Parkinson’s disease. In conversation, he analogized that effort with his decision in the 1990s to write music directly on gay themes.

“I like being open,” he said, “about all the things that are hard to be open about.”

Read entire NY Times Interview HERE

See Westbeth Icon Interview with David Del Tredici HERE

Home Page photo Del Tredici is at work on an opera about his experience with Parkinson’s disease.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York Times/strong>