Juilliard Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin, Lukas Foss, Gerard Schwarz; Gary Lakes, tenor

Of the three composers recorded here, it is Jacob Druckman (b 1928) who has changed the most in his approach to composition. After years of involvement with serial techniques, it was in Windows (1972) that he began to readmit elements of the musical past into his work.

The titles of Druckman's works—Incenters, Windows, Aureole, Prism—often display an interest in visual or spatial concepts. In Chiaroscuro, scored for a fairly large orchestra, including electric piano and electric organ, he set out to give musical expression to the Italian Renaissance sense of chiaroscuro—chiaro means “clear” or “light,” oscuro, “obscure” or “dark. ”The effect is gestural, strongly atmospheric, full of sudden flashes of color and lowering banks of shadow. Putting aside traditional formal patterns, the composer creates a cogent replacement for them through his keen sense of music as an art that subsists in time: the “light” and “dark” elements are placed, now in simultaneous juxtaposition, now in telling isolation, in the shape of individual timbres and sharply differentiated modes of vibration.

In Aftertones of Infinity, which won Joseph Schwantner (b 1943) the 1979 Pulitzer prize for music, the time element takes center stage in a fascinatingly paradoxical way. Indeed, the very title is a paradox, combining as it does the nation of infinity with the notion of “after”-ness. Schwantner has fashioned a piece with passages of suspended animation alternating with others where the rapid succession of chords or the onslaught of dynamic percussion create a poetic illusion—but only an illusion—of movement.

In such a style, “slow” and `fast” are equally illusory. There is something of the rapt mysticism of Olivier Messiaen in this music, with its tintinnabulating processionals flecked with high harmonics, its gnomic outbursts of solemn, statuesque brass, its recurrent “celestial choir” passages sung by the orchestra members, and its telling use of tuned crystal glasses—“You can hear them,” Schwantner observes, “but you can't put your finger on the sound. ”The piece takes its shape from a poem, written by the composer himself, a “kind of `creative generator'” that provides “a wellspring of extramusical images and ideas to which I would attempt to find appropriate musical analogues. ”

Stephen Albert’s (b 1941) work sounds more obviously distant from old fashioned serialism than does that of his two colleagues. His brush with serialism was perhaps less intense, and certainly his rejection of it more rapid, than theirs. While he shares their readiness to take inspiration from extramusical sources— several of his works are settings or interpretations of James Joyce—it is his revitalization of thematic melody and traditional rhythmic articulation that makes his music more immediately accessible to a lay listener.

But though Into Eclipse is classical in its sense of musical time, the direct way it moves from point A to point B should not prevent us from noting the subtleties of Albert's style. His blend of diatonic harmony with expressive chromatic inflections and of irregular rhythms with ostinato figures, striking a nice balance between dynamic and static elements, creates a language of vivid ritual feeling that is especially apt to his subject here. Based on Seneca's Oedipus in an adaptation by the modern English poet Ted Hughes, Into Eclipse spans an expressive range, from agitation and horror to the self-blinded king's eventual inward-turned resignation.