German composer Claus Ogermann recently made a delightful remark in an interview with British music critic Martin Anderson. He said, “Look back at Donaueschingen [the German Mecca of the avant garde], where they’ve been playing modern music since 1923 or ’24—they’ve premiered 2,000 compositions there, of which none has left any mark. It’s as if you had a factory producing things that weren’t working.”
I have been fascinated as to why almost an entire century devoted itself to producing music that doesn’t work and even more curious about the relatively unknown music written during that same period that does work. I have covered much of that territory in the new book that Crisis just issued, Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music. But, of course, more undiscovered territory keeps appearing, thanks to the CD revolution and adventurous labels such as Naxos, Chandos, Koch, and CPO. Herewith follow recent releases of music that works.
I skirt the time frame by starting with Sergei Taneyev (1856-1915), whose life only bled a decade and a half into the 20th century. Several issues ago, I raved about this genius’s chamber music. Now Chandos has given us the first pairing of modern recordings of Taneyev’s Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4, played by the Russian State Symphony Orchestra, under Valeri Polyansky. This is majestic music that will leave you wondering why Taneyev never bothered to finish orchestrating the Second and why the Fourth was the only one of his four symphonies to be performed in his lifetime.
Take the stunning first movement of the Second Symphony. It begins with a quiet, gorgeous, long-lined theme that seems as if it is coming out of a dark dream, the beauty of which Polyansky is very adept at displaying. It slowly builds and then segues to a second theme of high energy that sounds as if Beethoven had rewritten Handel’s Hallelujah theme. At its climax, it then transforms itself into what could pass, quite improbably, as a passage from one of Elgar’s ripest works. There are also grace notes to Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and Mendelssohn in this fascinating piece. Taneyev pulls all this off in a totally integrated fashion. The movement is a brilliant tour de force.
Polyansky captures the sheer beauty and most of the drama, but I must confess that the old Russian Disc (no longer available) featuring a performance by the USSR Radio Symphony Orchestra, with Vladimir Fedoseyev, aces this one in expressing the last ounce of dramatic tension. Polyansky need bow to no one in his portrayal of the bold Fourth, which begins with a highly arresting three-note staccato theme. Throughout these two symphonies, Taneyev displays his breathtaking contrapuntal mastery, the greatest, Tchaikovsky announced, of any composer in Russia and probably all of Europe at the time.
Deeper into the 20th century, the eponymous Martinu Quartet has brought to completion its traversal of Bohuslav Martinu’s (1890-1959) seven string quartets on the budget Naxos label. The first issue in the series contained Quartets Nos. 1 and 2, which were heavily influenced by French impressionism. The following two CDs contain Quartets Nos. 3 to 7. By the time of the Third Quartet, Martinu’s style had become less French and more idiosyncratically Czech in respect to its quirky rhythms and Moravian folk melodies. In the later quartets, one hears abbreviated echoes of the extraordinary sound world of Martinu’s symphonies, along with his signature chugging ostinatos. I was going to say that Nos. 3, 4, 6, and 7 are especially good, but that would seem prejudicial against poor No. 5, which is perhaps the most distinctive of the lot in its harrowing sorrow. It is certainly far removed from the delightful, almost Haydnesque world of No. 7. In any case, these CDs are self-recommending to anyone with the slightest interest in Martinu… The Martinu Quartet’s performances are on the same high level that the first CD led one to expect.
More of the marvelous, musical mayhem of Heitor Villa-Lobos (18871959) is now available thanks to several new releases. Perhaps the least known part of this man’s extensive oeuvre is his twelve symphonies. Of course, one must use the term symphony very loosely, as these works are every bit as much fantasias as his other orchestral works. One might not think that a German orchestra would be the best guide through Villa-Lobos’s musical jungle, but as proven in its excursion through Symphonies Nos. 4 and 12, the SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart, under Carl St. Clair, brings clarity, concision, and élan to these inimitably Brazilian works, which is just what they need in performance. The same qualities are evident in the performances of Symphonies Nos. 3 and 9 on this second installment in CPO’s series of the complete symphonies. I highly recommend it.
The Koch International Classics label has beaten CPO to the punch with the world-premier recording of Villa-Lobos’s Symphony No. 10, Amerindia, with the Santa Barbara Orchestra and Choral Society, under Gisele Ben-Dor. This is a brave attempt to tame one of the most luxuriant jungle growths Villa-Lobos ever spawned. Symphony No. 10 is a five-part oratorio written for the 400th anniversary of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1952. It employs texts of the Tupi dialect, Portuguese and Latin, in an “allegorical, historical, and religious account of the city.” Depending on your tolerance for the exotic, you may either dismiss or enjoy this as an extravagant curiosity. It is certainly over the top, even for this musical conjuror.
It is hard to believe that the composer who wrote something as outlandish as the Tenth Symphony is the same one who composed chamber music of such French refinement as is found on a new CPO disc featuring Villa-Lobos’s delicious String Trio, Duo for Violin and Viola, and two shorter works for violin and cello. I think Villa-Lobos’s chamber music stands in relation to his symphonies very much in the same way as do Shostakovich’s exquisite string quartets with his sometimes bombastic symphonies. In both cases, the chamber music contains their finest music. The German String Trio gives completely convincing performances.
What defines Marco Polo as a great label is that it does things like record the complete symphonies of Portuguese composer Joly Braga Santos (1924-1988). The last thing I would have expected from Portugal is a combination of Vaughan Williams and Sibelius, but that is what this extraordinarily grand and sweeping music sounds like. In American parlance, I would have to call him a Portuguese Howard Hanson. Conductor Alvaro Cassuto and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland close out the cycle of six symphonies with magnificent performances of the Fourth Symphony and the Symphonic Variations. Braga Santos was a composer of big gestures who knew how to construct the architecture within which to contain them so that they work to maxi-mum effect. His mission, he said, was “to react against the predominant tendency of the generation that preceded me to reject monumentalism in music.” He succeeded in both these works. The Variations reflect not only the influence of Sibelius; parts of it could pass as a Portuguese La Mer.
Another Marco Polo CD gives us some of Braga Santos’s orchestral music for strings: Concerto for Strings in D; Sinfonietta for Strings; Variations Concertantes for Strings and Harp; and Concerto for Violin, Cello, Strings, and Harp. The first of these inhabits the same world as Vaughan Williams’s great string works. Its Adagio is a gorgeous, mesmerizing lament that was played at Braga Santos’s funeral Mass. The other works are from his later, more harmonically acerbic period, but they too work in their own deliberately disquieting way Alvaro Cassuto delivers beautiful performances with the Northern Sinfonia.