Music: Summer Listening

Summer spells leisure because the days last longer. I plan to spend them listening to things I enjoy.

This means new discoveries, which I particularly delight in, and visiting some old friends. Here are some brief notes on a lineup for the lazy days.

For refreshment, I am turning to the piano concertos of Bohuslav Martina (1890-1959), of which there are five. These works, written from 1925 to 1958, are like a musical splash of cool spring water. They are defined by fancy and delight, curlicues of counterpoint, Martind’s signature syncopated rhythms, and gorgeous melodies. Yes, there is occasional dissonance for spice, but all resolves itself into an almost epiphanic lyricism. There is a minimum of the neoBaroque noodling that imparts a mechanical hum to Martina’s lesser works. It is the sense of play, whimsy, and sheer joy that attracts me.

There is only one integral recording available, and it is wonderful. The Supraphon two-CD set, which I recently bought in a Prague music shop, bubbles along with Emil Leichner at the piano (he has also ably recorded the complete piano music for the same label on three CDs) and the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, under conductor Jiri Belohlavek. As a bonus, the 1938 Concertino for Piano and Orchestra is included. As one would expect from these artists, the performances are completely idiomatic. This music is in the Czech blood. Some performers are wont to punch the syncopated rhythms too hard, making the music sound freakish. Here the exciting rhythms and lyricism are kept in perfect equilibrium.

Joining these old friends is a new find from the CPO label: Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek’s tone poems, Schlemihl: A Symphonic Life Study and Raskolnikoff, brilliantly played by the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, under Michail Jurowski. Reznicek (1860-1945) inhabits the world of late Romanticism. His once-substantial reputation was reduced to the title tune of the popular quiz show, Name That Tune, in the 1950s. From what I hear on this CD, he deserves a revival, especially for those who love the works of Richard Strauss. I am tempted to call this music Strauss-lite. All I would mean by such a remark is that Reznicek’s orchestration is highly accomplished and rich, but not to the extent of Strauss’s, which every moment threatens to drown itself in its own sumptuousness.

Needless to say, with an unusual title like Schlemihl, Reznicek’s 44-minute tone poem for orchestra and tenor solo is a kind of non-Heldenleben, Strauss’s celebration of himself. Reznicek apparently suffered some rough times, including the loss of his first wife. So he resolved, “Before I in some way vanished from the face of the earth, I would set down all my distress and sufferings in a sort of self-confession, leave something behind, as it were, as a testament in tones.” What is interesting here, however, is that the music never really becomes all that grim. As Straussian as it sounds, Schlemihl also contains some fascinating premonitions of Bernard Hermann’s haunting film scores written a half-century later, along with shades of Mahler and early Schoenberg of the Gurrelieder period, especially in the last movement tenor solo. This highly attractive, lavish music is a real find.

If we feel the crush of modernity, we can always repair to the world of Classical order, at least as it was just before being overcome by Romantic disorders. CPO proves itself to be the very model of an adventurous label by bringing to completion its cycle of Ferdinand Ries symphonies with its release of Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8, two works that were unpublished in his lifetime and were composed in reverse order. As were its predecessors in this outstanding series, these are exhilarating works by a Beethoven clone about whom Beethoven himself complained: “He imitates me too closely.” Nevertheless, Beethoven influenced everyone at the time, and no one imitated him better than Ries. Like Beethoven, Ries was preoccupied with the generation of power through tonal conflict and resolution. If these works suffer from anything, it is through their insistence on this single-minded purpose. Howard Griffiths and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra maintain the standards they have observed throughout this superb, revelatory series.

Beethoven’s predominance also eclipsed another composer from this fecund period, Friedrich Ernst Fesca (1789-1826). CPO has released Fesca’s Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3, delivered exuberantly by the NDR Radio Philharmonic, under conductor Frank Beermann. These are thoroughly engaging, brilliant works that integrate the influence of Beethoven more seamlessly than Reis without being overwhelmed by it. That is so because they lean more toward their predecessors in Haydn and Mozart. Though they possess ample energy, these works still have as their primary goal beauty and even charm. Where Ries’s symphonies may seem at times unremitting in their production of power, Fesca’s have a melodic fluency that carries them safely through. Fesca had a short life, but we can blame not mortality but Carl Maria von Weber for having distracted him from his masterful symphonic work to vocal composition. Thus, alas, the Third was his last symphonic work.

I have for some time been anxious to bring to your attention a neglected chamber work from the very end of the Romantic period, Adolphe Biarent’s Piano Quintet (1913), performed by the Danel Quartet and pianist Diane Andersen. There is something so right about this music that it will immediately seem familiar, as if you had known it always. It is a highly Romantic, almost hypertrophic expression of close-to-unhinged passion. It is a big-boned, loose-limbed, improvisational-seeming work of almost 40 minutes’ duration. The composer may be Belgian and the influences French, but the work reminds me of the massive chamber works with piano by the great Russian composer, Sergei Taneyev. This desperate work will grab you by the lapels and not let you go until the end. If you can recover sufficiently, there is then an equally extra ordinary cello sonata accompanying it. The Cypres Records label on which it appears is hard to find, but if this is your cup of absinthe, find it.

There was a reaction to this kind of Romanticism and we hear it in Arthur Berger’s spiky, jewellike works. Berger (b. 1912) may not be a highly original American composer, as he is very much indebted to the neo-Classical tradition of Stravinsky and Copland. So what? Like the New World Records CD of his chamber works that preceded this new release, this CD of his complete orchestral music confirms him as a craftsman of the highest order. If a composer can be thought of as a jeweler, this music is jewelry, perfectly faceted. In the most recent work contained here, Perspectives II (1985), Berger’s rhythmic preoccupations win out over melodic line. In the other, earlier works, there is a splendid balance between rhythmic, syncopated complexity and Coplandesque lyrical yearning. The Boston Modern Orchestra Project, under conductor Gil Rose, is perfectly in sync with these works.

In America, Romanticism did not die because it did not succumb to the hysterical, neurasthenic paroxysms that engulfed it in Europe. Samuel Barber (1910-1981) gave it a second chance in his wonderfully fresh, lyrical music. Naxos has released its fifth installment in its ongoing, outstanding cycle of his works. It features the Second and Third of his three dramatic Essays for Orchestra, Toccata Festiva, and, most importantly, the radiant Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Barber said Knoxville was written to capture “a child’s feelings of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.” It does more than that.

Commissioned in 1947, Knoxville is a setting of a text by James Agee that served as a prelude to his heartbreaking, unfinished novel, A Death in the Family. Here a child speaks of the simple sights and sounds of an evening with his family on the lawn before going to bed. Out of this, Barber created a sublime masterpiece that captures the poignancy of the transitory, and aching, universal experience of “lack of identity.” After praying for his family, the child speaks of them as “those [who] receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home; but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”

No, of course they will not, cannot, because your identity is hidden in your creator Christ, who will show you to yourself when He meets you. If you can listen to this music and Agee’s words without tears streaming down your face, you have not listened closely enough. Soprano Karina Gauvin soars in vocal glory to the extraordinarily beautiful accompaniment of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, under Marin Alsop.

Author

  • Robert R. Reilly

    Robert R. Reilly is the author of America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, forthcoming from Ignatius Press.

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