Markevitch: Complete Orchestral Music Volume Six

The story of Igor Markevitch the composer is most unusual and rather tragic. For eight years he was considered one of the brightest lights of European new music and he turned out a series of orchestral works that show a remarkable maturity for someone of his age. More important the compositions show a mastery of the orchestral palate and an originality that shine through today as you hear the best of the works. Then, abruptly, he stopped composing completely and went on to international acclaim as a conductor. He never went back. At the time of his death in 1983 only one of his works had been recorded, and that on a set of inferior shellac 78-rpm dubs.

Volume Six (Naxos 8.572156) of Naxos's Complete Orchestral Works introduces us to a major work he composed toward the end (1938-39) of his compositional career. La Taille de l'Homme was left unfinished, only half of the projected work survives. But those 55 or so minutes are impressive evidence of Markevitch's stature.

Scored for soprano (Lucy Shelton on this recording) and symphony orchestra (the Arnhem Philharmonic under Lydon-Gee here), the work has depth, orchestral luminescence, a bittersweet ethos and scherzo-like moments with a kind of grotesque, macabre quality. The world premiere recording is a very good one and gives you an excellent look at how Markevitch by that point had mastered his art. There are the influences of Stravinsky, Prokofiev and perhaps Milhaud, but the more you listen the more you realize that the at-first vague feeling that he doesn't fit into any of those model exemplifications has grown as you become more familiar with his work. Perhaps no more so than with the work at hand.

Anyone with an interest in the 20th-century music world cannot afford to miss the experience of Igor Markevitch. This recording of La Taille de l'Homme is a very good place to start.

Evan Chambers, and His Moving Work "The Old Burying Ground"

Evan Chambers. Never heard his music before. The Old Burying Ground (Dorian 92113) is a major work that, once heard, makes you attach much to the name Chambers.

It's a long, ambitious piece for full orchestra, one folksinger, soprano, tenor, and a moment here and there for recitation. The work is based on the composer's experience of visiting a very old graveyard in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. It's one of those places from colonial times, the church it was a part of now gone, the graves and exotically archaic gravestones of unknown and now unknowable people all that's left to mark a world that has disappeared into time. From that experience Maestro Chambers has fashioned a kind of elegaic meditation on the lives and deaths of those who lived, died, and ended there, to be forgotten by those who came after. I'd say it reminds me of Hindemith's elegaic tribute to Lincoln/FDR based on Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloomed. But no, not precisely.

Still, the music is movingly impactful and very memorable in the way Hindemith's work is, so that's where there are parallels. And like Lilacs and, for that matter, Barber's Knoxville, it most poetically conjures time lost. What is especially eerie about the work is that much of the music evokes the sort of folk strains that early settlers in that part of New Hampshire must have lived with. The music is quite beautiful for that and intrinsically as well. Chambers is a lyrical composer, a great musical storyteller and a composer of dramatic reflection.

This most certainly in my mind is a important work of and for today, but with an archaic quality that sets it apart.

The poetic texts, the excellent vocalists, and the University of Michigan Orchestra under the direction of Kenneth Kiesler make for a definitive performance. I only hope other orchestras take this work up. I believe it would have great appeal to audiences.

Highly recommended.

Pascal Dusapin's Masterful "7 Solos Pour Orchestre"

Pascal Dusapin was born in 1955. That doesn't make him exactly a youngster, but considering, say, Elliot Carter (who has been productive for very many years), Dusapin (one hopes) has a good time to come where he can continue to extend his music. As it is, the Pascal Dusapin of the Seven Solos for Orchestra is a composer fully matured and extraordinarily eloquent in his orchestral writing. The seven solos were written over a period between 1991-2008. The gathering together and performing of the entire cycle for the first time on disk makes it clear that this is important music.

Unlike Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, here we have music where sonority takes precedent over group virtuosity.

The compete set of Solos we've been discussing is out on a 2-CD set (Naive 782180), with Pascal Rophe conducting the Orchestre Philharmonique de Liege Wallonie Bruxelles. It is concentrated, focused music and the performances are quite exciting. Maestro Dusapin writes music that has a kind of inexorable logic. The music is very modern and uses melodic-intervalic-harmonic cells as ideas that unfold with a kind of linear reasonableness. Like Varese before him, Dusapin creates a musical syntax that has movingly expressive content but also flows out if itself with speech-like clarity. The music-speech we hear is his own. Very much so.

Each of the fairly short pieces is a gem; together they make a marvelous impression on this listener. Dusapin crafts inspired music. Listen to this one and I think you'll agree. Most highly recommended. . .

New Recording of Roy Harris's Symphonies Five and Six

Naxos Records is in the process of releasing the complete cycle of symphonies by American composer Roy Harris. That can only be a good thing, especially if the present volume is any indication.

Harris's (1898-1979) reputation as an important composer in the modern post-Ivesian mode seems to have waned sometime in the late '50s, only to revive again in the past decade or so. Perhaps it was easy to take him for granted during a period where the very latest advancement of new music got fleeting, flavor-of-the-month attention at the expense of composers who weren't radically breaking with tradition but nonetheless created a body of works that had lasting value.

I do not wish to imply that there isn't much of lasting value in the more avant composers of that era, but that's another matter. Harris was certainly one of those in the less sensational, less "advanced" category, along with Piston, William Schumann and a handful of others. His World War II Era symphonies were more overtly nationalist, at least in sentiment, than some of the earlier and later works. In any event they remain excellent examples of the Harris style, long unwinding melodies changing hands among instrumental groups, crisp, clear orchestrations, a bracing, restrained lyricism. Listen to the sonorous, majestic, martial strains remembered in solitude as worked out in the Second Movement of his Fifth Symphony if you need convincing.

Marin Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony give carefully but passionately rendered performances of these works. The added bonus of the miniature work "Acceleration," later reworked into the Sixth Symphony, gives a nice finishing touch to the presentation.

Highly recommended listening. . .

Lyell Cresswell, New Zealand's Worthy Composer

If you aren't familiar with the music of Lyell Cresswell you aren't alone. Before I heard the new Naxos CD under consideration today, I had no exposure to him. He was born in 1944. He is a living presence. The Voice Inside showcases four of his compositions for orchestra. There is the title piece, The Voice Inside, and Cassandra's Songs, both of which feature the very appealing mezzo-soprano of Madeleine Picard. Then there is Alas! How Swift and Kaea, with solo spots for trumpet and trombone, respectively. The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra under James Judd provide seemingly definitive performances of the music.

And what of it? Cresswell has a beautiful feel for the orchestral possibilities available to him and makes fine use of the various combinations at hand. His music is firmly in the modern mainstream. It is neither highly romantic nor is it especially abstract or dissonant.

The two works for mezzo-soprano and orchestra show that he has a definite flair for evoking sound-pictures that complement and extend the meaning of the lyrics. All the works give you plenty of evidence of a lucid musical mind at work. This Cresswell program should provide the serious listener with much to appreciate.

Igor Markevitch, Forgotten 20th Century Composer

If you are between ages 11 and 60-something, you know the 20th century almost exclusively from the last half, and perhaps not all of it. So if you know the name Igor Markevitch (1912-1983), it's probably as a conductor. Yet between 1929-1943, he was considered one of the most advanced and formidable European composers.

He gave up all composing activity after this period. Both he and the musical world passively or actively let his body of works slide into oblivion. Only now, thanks in part to Naxos' thus far three-volume survey of his orchestral works, can we listen again to his music. And that is what I have been doing, namely the third volume of his Complete Orchestral Works, performed with respectable verve and panache by the Arnheim Philharmonic under Christopher Lyndon-Gee.

Incredibly the three works in this volume, Cantique d'Amour, L'Envol d'Icare, and Concerto Grosso have never been commercially recorded before.

A close listen to this volume reveals a major stylist, a modernist with his own palette of orchestral color, an inventive craftsman of ambitiously dramatic works.

His is a music less manic than early Prokofiev, more somber and dark than Stravinsky, less cellular-motival than Varese. It is the music of Markevitch! Naxos does us all a service with this series. No serious student of the music of pre-World War II Europe can afford to ignore this release. It's revelatory. Now I need to hear the first two volumes!!