Eclectic Hermit

"The professional critics will no doubt call this work eclectic," said Leonard Bernstein, warming to one of his fireside chats from the podium of Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall. "Very well. Here are the elements you may find: certainly Schoenberg, Mahler, perhaps Bartok. This is the music of a very eclectic man, and you should hear the passion of Spain, the worldliness of Vienna, the German methodology, the English love of tradition." With that, New York Philharmonic Pianist Paul Jacobs sounded the first six notes of the tone row with a crashing force that introduced to the U.S. the haunting Symphony No. 1 of Spanish-Exile Composer Roberto Gerhard. When the final note was sounded by a lone violin, it was clear that the premiere had been long overdue.

Speed & Excitement. Gerhard, 66, fled Spain during the Civil War. Earlier he had studied with Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin, but he decided to go to England and settled at Cambridge, turning down teaching offers in favor of life as a freelance composer. "Teaching would have been safety-first," he says, "a sign of lack of confidence to survive." Instead, he adopted a hermit's quiet and began turning out a blizzard of atonal music. The Symphony No. 1, composed in 1953, was not played publicly in England until last February, but it has already made Gerhard a major English succes d'estime.

Gerhard's music is splashed with cliff-hanging melodies that grow out of his insistence that twelve-tone composition need not always be atonal. "There are alarming signs that composition with twelve tones may become a Cause," he wrote while working on his symphony, then proved his freedom from causes by building his music on rhythmic patterns outlawed by the canons of serial technique. The First Symphony opens with a lively burst of serial figures, repeated over and over in headstrong violation of Schoenberg's rules. Rushing excitement then gives way to the eerie calm of the second movement; the science-fiction-thriller sound of Gerhard's adagio strings led the admiring critic of the London Times to pronounce the imagery of Gerhard's world "as excitingly mysterious as that of any space traveller."

In the final movement, a race of violins and piano goes so fast that a second-chair man complained during rehearsals that it could not be played at all. "Wait till you get excited." Bernstein said, and in last week's performances, the movement came off beautifully.

Meat & Poison. Gerhard has just completed a string quartet to add to the thick sheaf of compositions that has followed the First Symphony--another symphony, a concerto for harpsichord, strings and percussion, and a new work called Concert for Eight, which is scored for an accordion and seven instruments "masked" to produce odd sounds. He is totally unconcerned about the cool public reception his works usually find. When a listener cried "Rubbish!" at the close of a Gerhard concert in England two years ago, Gerhard blithely said: "One man's meat is another man's poison, but I hope the man who thinks my music is rubbish may soon become civilized."

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