Before The Rite of Spring was a glint in Stravinsky’s eye, in the US the young Russian émigré Leo Ornstein was briefly the poster boy for musical modernism. He claimed his earliest, fiercest works just sprang into his head, unbidden and virtually fully formed; by the time he wrote his Piano Quintet and his Second String Quartet, his dissonant imagination had begun to frighten even himself, and he had consciously pulled back from those extremes to the more consonant yet still driven style that characterises these two rarely performed works. Forcefully rhythmic passages built from repeating patterns alternate with sweeping, rhapsodic paragraphs; the Quintet especially is full of eastern harmonic inflections. Pianist Marc-André Hamelin and the Pacifica Quartet are whole-hearted advocates, though even they can’t disguise the fact that Ornstein’s obsessive treatment of small blocks of musical material becomes monotonous in both works, and that the long finale of the Quintet is spectacularly overblown.
