First performed in 2007 by James Levine and the Boston Symphony, Charles Wuorinen’s Eighth is his most recent symphony to date. It carries the title Theologoumena, which apparently means “a private non-dogmatic theological opinion”, in this case a second-century attempt to reconcile ancient classical belief systems with Christian monotheism. The text suggested to Wuorinen a kind of symphonic progression, a fast-slow-fast structure in which each movement is dominated by a single type of material. It generates wiry, energetic music, sometimes densely contrapuntal, sometimes thinning out into a flamboyant instrumental solo, and all very much in the style of late Schoenberg and serial Stravinsky; Wuorinen has always been one of the most unrepentant of US modernists.
Two years earlier, the Fourth Piano Concerto had been a commission from Levine and the BSO, too – one of a number of pieces that Wuorinen has composed for Peter Serkin. It’s marginally more compact and a bit less prickly than the symphony, but it remains a formidably rigorous piece. As with the symphony, the recording is taken from the premiere, in which Serkin’s playing is consummately authoritative.
