Patrick Moore & Andrew Staupe: Four Generations
Navona Records

On Four Generations, cellist Patrick Moore and pianist Andrew Staupe present a smart programme literally featuring works from four distinct generations, Darius Milhaud's Élégie for Violoncello and Piano (1945) the earliest and William Bolcom's Sonata No. 1 for Violoncello and Piano (1989), Arthur Gottschalk's Sonata for Cello and Piano: In Memoriam (2006), and Karl Blench's Dreams and Hallucinations for Cello and Piano (2014, rev. 2022) following. Such sequencing makes for a striking temporal travelogue and ensures that stylistic contrasts arise between the selections. Adding to the recording, the works accentuates musical mentorship in reflecting the teacher-student relationships that factored into their creation. Bolcom was a student of Milhaud's, as was Gottschalk of Bolcom's, and Gottschalk in turn mentored a generation of composers that included Blench. The continuum in this case mirrors, of course, the mentor-mentee connections every generation's artists has to those coming before and after.

A one-time student as well as teacher, Les Six member Milhaud studied under Paul Dukas and Vincent d'Indy at the Paris Conservatory and after emigrating to the United States in 1940 numbered Dave Brubeck, Burt Bacharach, and, of course, Bolcom among his pupils. The latter, the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and other honours, studied with Milhaud at Mills College but also Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire. A distinguished educator plus composer, Gottschalk holds the title of Professor of Music Composition at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music, where he oversaw the school's electronic music laboratories until 2002 and chaired the composition and theory department for fifteen years. The Houston-based Blench acquired his undergraduate degrees from the University of New Hampshire before doing graduate work at Rice University, where he earned master's and doctoral degrees in music composition.

Moore and Staupe are well-equipped for the project's challenges. While the cellist is a founding member of the Axiom Quartet and has premiered several contemporary works, the pianist boasts a concerto repertoire spanning more than seventy pieces and has performed as a soloist with numerous orchestras and delivered recitals across the United States and Europe. Recorded over two December 2024 days, Four Generations begins alluringly with Milhaud's single-movement expression. While his music sometimes veers into bitonality, dissonance, and polychords, it can also be pronouncedly lyrical, as evidenced by the haunting Élégie. This seductive vocalise is well-suited to Moore's and Staupe's talents, with the cello's expressivity exploited to the full. While it daringly navigates between major and minor modes, the work never loses its graceful thread.

According to Bolcom, the sonata he created for Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax draws from a broad range of musical traditions, both serious and popular, and integrates concepts from three centuries of music history into a work of three contrasting movements—“a serious piece of music with a serious sense of humour,” in the composer's apt description. However traditionally structured it is, it ventures boldly beyond tradition when its “Allegro inquieto” oscillates between sober passages and salon-like irreverence. As polytonal but gentler, naturally, is the central “Adagio semplice,” which works through episodes tender and supplicating over its eight-minute journey (particularly rhapsodic is a poetic double-stopped episode that emerges during the last quarter). Following it, the short “Allegro assai” caps the work on a robust, even playful note.

Commissioned by the Fischer Duo and created with its virtuosity and musicality in mind, Gottschalk's three-movement sonata uses initials to reference dedicatees Malcolm Brodwick, Rafael Fliegel, and Richard J. V. Johnson. As such, the composer fashioned the parts as intense sketches of men who were of immense personal importance. Though Gottschalk humbly states that “these sketches cast but a feeble light on proportionately small aspects of their giant personas,” they do justice to them in being multi-faceted and engrossing. Mystery pervades the cinematic opening of “(M.B.)” before things take a livelier and rollicking turn. The heartfelt hush with which “(R.F.)” begins suggests the deep affection Gottschalk felt for Fliegel and the presumed sorrow his passing engendered, and it's perhaps here more than anywhere else on the recording that Moore's capacity for emotional expression is invoked. Fierce, furious, and frenzied by comparison is “(R.J.),” a Dionysian wildfire that suggests a struggle of epic proportions.

Crafted as a musical realization of dreams and hallucinations experienced by a character the composer calls ‘The Man,' Blench's Moore-commissioned work contrasts four serious dream tonalities with three lighter hallucinations. Its programmatic design announces itself during the prelude-styled “Dream I: The Man, Alone, Calling Out” when the cello embodies the persona of the protagonist singing from a mountain precipice in the hope, according to Blench, “that someone is listening, though no one is.” A macabre dance is the driving force behind the goblins-filled “Night Terror Ballet,” while the other perilous hallucinations, “Distorted Reality” and “The Bad Trip,” find the figure's grip on reality fragmenting and his worst fears coming true. Blench's conceptual daring comes to the fore during the nightmarish “The Isolation of the Man” when a dark chaconne in the piano is underscored by a single-note drone from the cello. The music's barren and lonely character articulates the requisite tone for the third dream, “The Desolation of the Man,” after which the final one, “The Beyond,” has ‘The Man' dynamically envisioning what's beyond his brief earthly tenure.

December 2025