James Cohn and Paul Joseph

Musical Styles

Avina Harichandra

Conductor Dong-hyun Kim rendered Symphony No. 4 composed by James Cohn flawlessly; he led the orchestra through its erudite and diverse mix of idioms, its meditatively vague initial movement and blustering, anguish-driven finale, a summoning of Hungary's Soviet invasion in the year 1956. One would not be exaggerating if one were to label this as the 1812 Overture of Cohn, though it culminates on a markedly unresolved and muted note. Nervously tricky metrics replaced indirect, grey-sky, wounded graphics as well as a spurt of abrupt certainty, when suddenly the inescapable conclusion manifested itself. The composer is possibly a more familiar face in the European region than here (three of his symphonies were recorded, by the Slovak Radio Symphony recently). A much larger audience would be enriched by his music (LucidCulture, 2015).

The audiences will first get to hear James Cohn, whose music was composed during the fifties -- a time when Eastern Europe was barraged by Soviet invasions; this will be followed by "The King and the Mask,," Paul Joseph's contemporary, incorporating visual art and ballet. Conductor Kim stated that the former composition (of Cohn) was rather dark, "like a tragedy," reflecting his hopelessness over the invasion by Russia, whereas the latter piece (of Joseph) was "fantasy." He further states that the two pieces give rise to an extreme contrast for viewers, with the juxtaposition of two contradictory emotions one after another. According to Joseph, the rendition builds both musically and chronologically toward the 50-minute-long "The King of the Mask," which comprises of twenty-two short movements (Edmonds, 2015).

However, in Joseph's view, the piano performance resembled a monochrome movie with the orchestra being a Technicolor theater. The piece was inspired by 6ft. oil paintings, which will be hung at the time of the performance, on stage. They show a human form with the head of a lion; the face appears to be haughty. The creature, portrayed in all paintings in extravagant costumes and a perfect mane, poses with crossed legs, or with a pink-colored ice-cream cone or fan, staring directly at the lens. The backgrounds and everything else in the paintings are covered in rich colors; the background sometimes portrays ghostly figures lurking behind the main lion-man figure. The paintings deal with confronting death and struggling for immortality via an imaginary universe as per the artists, which combines reality with fantasy. Composer Joseph claims that the paintings lured him into that universe, forming the milieu for his continuous imaginative play -- via music. He further states that he visited the whole of that king's universe, and that there was no one-to-one agreement between the paintings and the movements (Edmonds, 2015).