divertimento for viola and piano, op. 32, no. 1 ("Frankenstein")
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Joseph Baber, viola; Lawrence Dennis, piano
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Needing a new work to put on a concert at Southern Illinois University, Baber pieced together excerpts from his first opera Frankenstein, which was being written with novelist John Gardner at the time. The results were gratifying enough that Baber went on to write two more divertimenti in the same five-movement format.
These five movements are played attacca and have the same hallucinatory quality as the other works inspired by Gardner's kaleidoscopic libretto. After an initial burst of satirical atonality reflective of the opera, the work settles into Baber's more lyrical and tonal modernist style. |
