Even by composer standards, Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) was a little bit of a strange bird. Despite a promising start – born to musical parents, a precocious childhood, meetings with major conductors, and a symphony performed by the Berlin Philharmonic – his personal and creative eccentricities worked against him.
Langgaard followed his personal muse deep into the realm of late Romanticism at a time when most of the musical world was exploring modernist territory. Though he was given a state grant at 30, he failed to secure a permanent job until the age of 46, as an organist at the cathedral in Ribe, the oldest town in Denmark – which somehow seems appropriate for this most anachronistic of Danish outsiders.
An eccentric, shabby figure with wild hair, Laangaard died in Ribe 13 years later, in 1952, just shy of his 59th birthday, still largely unrecognized as a composer.
His reputation would not begin to gain traction for another 16 years. In all, he composed over 400 works, including 16 symphonies – which bear evocative titles such as “Yon Hall of Thunder” and “Deluge of the Sun” – and an opera, “Antikrist.”
It was in 1968 that no less a personage than György Ligeti found himself on a jury alongside Danish composer Per Nørgård. In this capacity, he examined a large number of new scores by Scandinavian composers. Unbeknownst to his fellow jurors, Nørgård had slipped in the score of Langgaard’s “Music of the Spheres.” Ligeti became captivated by what he found. When the ruse was revealed, he exclaimed, with a twinkle in his eye, “Gentlemen, I have just discovered that I am a Langgaard epigone!”
Langgaard had anticipated some of the technical aspects – tone clusters, layers, and so forth – which would appear in Ligeti’s avant garde experiments of the 1960s, in works such as “Atmosphères.”
I hope you’ll join me for “Rued Awakenings,” an hour of Rued Langgaard, including “Music of the Spheres,” on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu
Category: The Lost Chord
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Music of the Spheres on “The Lost Chord”
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Liking the Viking on “The Lost Chord”
This week on “The Lost Chord,” brace yourself for Icelandic composer Jon Leif’s “Saga Symphony.” Scored for tuned anvils, stones, whip, shields of iron, leather, and wood, great wooden casks played by large hammers, and six ancient long horns, or lurs, the work is an intriguing blend of extravagance and austerity.
Leifs studied in Leipzig and wound up stranded in Nazi Germany for much of World War II. You’d think the National Socialists would have gone ape for this musical advocate of Norse heroism, but two things worked against him: the modernist language of much of his output, and the fact that his wife and children were Jewish. Also, he found Wagner repellent, asserting that Wagner completely misunderstood the essence and artistic tradition of the North. Public performances of Leif’s works were discouraged (and would have been impractical anyway). Under the circumstances, he preferred to attract as little attention to himself as possible. He found escape in rereading the Icelandic sagas, even as he was used for propaganda purposes to strengthen Germany’s relations with Scandinavia.
Leifs finally managed to obtain permission to leave Germany in 1944. Unfortunately, suspicion of Nazi associations further hindered acceptance of his music abroad. It was only with a series of compact disc recordings released on the Swedish label BIS, beginning in the 1990s, that Leifs – who died in 1968 – was revealed to be Iceland’s most important composer, with a voice as distinctive as any of his time.
Iceland of a hundred years ago was a very different place than it is now. Leifs didn’t hear his first orchestra until he traveled to Leipzig. The “Saga Symphony” is a direct response to Franz Liszt’s “A Faust Symphony,” a performance of which sent the young composer into ecstasies. He went home and immediately began work on the piece we’ll hear tonight. However, his own approach is quite different from Liszt’s. In terms of symphonic development, there is none to speak of. In its place are evocative fields of static harmonies.
Each of the work’s five movements is a character portrait of a hero from the Norse sagas: the vitriolic warrior Skarphéðinn Njálsson (Njál’s Saga), who hacks and hews with his battle axe; the strong-willed Guðrún Ósvífsdóttir (Saga of the Laxardals), who avenges herself against her husband’s killer; the latently heroic comic braggart and coward Björn of Mörk, who takes shelter behind the swashbuckler Kári Sölmundarson, as Kári avenges the deaths of Njál and his sons; Grettir Ásmundarson, who vanquishes the ghost of Glámr in a wrestling match, only to be haunted ever after; and the warrior-poet Tormod Kolbrunarskald (The Foster Brother’s Saga), who pulls an arrow from his heart and even in the throes of death formulates an intricate poem.
Greet your fate with courage and stoicism. Join me for “Liking the Viking,” on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu -
Musical Wonder Cabinets on “The Lost Chord”
Cabinets of curiosities, also sometimes referred to as “wonder rooms,” were small collections of extraordinary objects, strange and often fanciful precursors of today’s museums, which attempted to categorize and explain oddities of the natural world. This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have three musical equivalents.
Princeton University professor Dmitri Tymoczko’s “Typecase Treasury” recalls a small table his parents acquired, made from a typecase subdivided into a hundred little compartments. “Each had been filled with a tiny mineralogical curiosity,” he writes, “a strange crystal, a piece of iron pyrite, a shark’s tooth, or a fossilized tribolyte.” He found it a useful metaphor for a multi-movement collection of short pieces, in which he attempts to produce “a sense of form through juxtaposition.”
Grammy Award-winner Michael Colina is perhaps best known for his jazz and Latin projects. However, Colina was classically trained, having studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts, and then abroad, at the Chigiana Academy, in Sienna, Italy. We’ll hear his Violin Concerto, subtitled “Three Cabinets of Wonder,” a work inspired by Fanny Mendelssohn, the Buddha, and an Amazonian nature spirit.
Finally, we’ll sample just a bit from “Cabinet of Curiosities” by Philadelphia-based composer Robert Moran, who’s something of a wonder himself. “The Hapsburg Kunstkammer” employs graphic notation and is scored for marimba, hairbrush, aluminum foil, bells played with fingers, finger cymbals, telephone bell, vibraphone, rubber ball, celesta and harpsichord.
I hope you’ll join me for “Curiouser and Curiouser,” a tour of musical wonder cabinets, on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_curiosities——–
Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
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Dark Horse Norsemen on “The Lost Chord”
A Norse is a Norse, of course, of course…
This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll make hay with music by a couple of Norwegian composers.
Halfdan Cleve (1879-1951) received unusually strict musical training. His father was an organist, who saddled his son with nothing but Bach until he was 16! The young Cleve then cantered to Germany, where he plowed through studies with the Scharwenka brothers, Philipp and Franz Xaver. The latter, a pupil of Franz Liszt, was regarded as one of the great thoroughbred keyboard virtuosos of his day.
Cleve became widely recognized as a composer and pianist, but his own popularity flagged after World War I. He reacted against the rise of modernism by doubling down, in the mane, on his pedigree, celebrating the Norwegian countryside and its folk idioms in his music. His Violin Sonata of 1919 was foaled of this approach.
Eyvind Alnaes (1872-1932), however, was a horse of a different color. Known, if at all, for his art songs – some of which were recorded by Kirsten Flagstad and Feodor Chaliapin – Alnaes’ musical language is less overtly “Norwegian” and more reactive to sugar cubes. His Piano Concerto of 1919 shadows Brahms and Tchaikovsky, and overtakes Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 4, not completed until seven years later. Could Alnaes have been the rock in Rach’s shoe?
Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets! The garland goes to “Dark Horse Norsemen” – works by neglected Norwegian composers – on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu
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Flagstad sings Alnaes
Chaliapin -
Everything Old is New Again on “The Lost Chord”
This week on “The Lost Chord,” what’s old is new again, as we enjoy a program of 20th century music by French composers who look back to their illustrious forebears.
In the 1870s, following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, there was a rise in musical nostalgia, with composers doing their part to mend the wounded national dignity by looking back to the galant style of the Ancien Régime – an idealized Golden Age which stood outside of Gallic history, full of shepherds and shepherdesses, panpipes and periwigs. The movement gave rise to such works as Camille Saint-Saëns’ Septet and the “Suite dans le style ancien” by Vincent d’Indy.
50 years later, a renewed fascination with music of the 18th century took root in the 1920s, in no small part because of Stravinsky’s sudden shift to neo-classicism. This was concurrent with the rise of Les Six, a loose collective of composers who had begun to flourish in Paris. We’ll hear three of their works that sprang from a shared affection for music of the Baroque.
One of the group’s more prominent members, Darius Milhaud, composed his “Suite d’après Corrette,” a piece for winds after 18th century composer Michel Corrette (with tell-tale “cuckoo” finale), in 1937. Eleven years later, he followed it with “L’Apothéose de Molière,” the title evocative of the spirit of Jean-Baptiste Lully. However, in this instance, the source material was culled from works by the lesser-known Baroque violinist and composer Baptiste Anet, a pupil Corelli and an elite musician in the service of Louis XIV. We’ll hear both Milhaud pieces, presented back-to-back.
Then we’ll have a work by one of his colleagues, the only female member of Les Six, Germaine Tailleferre. In 1964, Tailleferre paid tribute to the Baroque keyboard master Jean-Philippe Rameau, on the occasion of the bicentennial of his death. “Hommage à Rameau” falls into three movements and is scored for two pianos and percussion.
Finally, we’ll turn to Jean Françaix, who was NOT a member of Les Six, although his musical aesthetic would have fit right in. Had he been born twenty years earlier, we might be talking about Les Sept! Françaix’s “Duo Baroque,” composed in 1980, is scored for the unusual combination of double bass and harp. It pays tribute to no specific composer – in fact, for the most part, it doesn’t even sound particularly Baroque – though it does share a certain charm, wit, and elegance characteristic of music of the 18th century.
I hope you’ll join me for “Everything Old Is New Again,” on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!——–
Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
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