Another winner from the Emerald City

Langgaard: Prelude to Antichrist; Strauss: An Alpine Symphony

"When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself," says Nietzsche in The Antichrist, "but in 'the beyond'—in nothingness—then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether." Both Richard Strauss, whose Alpine Symphony, written in 1915, was a musical gloss on Nietzsche's work, following the similar Also Sprach Zarathustra of 1898, and Rued Langgaard, whose opera Antichrist was written in 1920-21, built their works on the idea of a more elemental life force, though Langgaard's own connection to the Antichrist was as much a musical attraction to Richard Strauss and Carl Nielsen as it was a philosophical one to Nietzsche.

"Did we notice how much music can free the spirit? Give wings to thoughts?", Nietzsche wrote in The Case of Wagner, "That, the more a musician we are, the more a philosopher we become?" At one time Nietzsche's idol was Wagner, but in Nietzsche Contra Wagner, his last work before his final madness, he rejects Wagner's music because of what he saw as a move towards Christianity by the composer. He called it "A Music Without A Future". So it makes a certain amount of sense to take the idea of the Antichrist, and using a post-Wagnerian, neo-Romantic musical style that rejects the modernism that both Strauss and Langgaard initially espoused, express Nietzsche's ideas in musical form. You don't need to agree with, or even try to understand, Nietzsche's concepts to appreciate this music. Both works are completely, ravishingly, beautiful, and ravishingly played by the great Seattle Symphony under Thomas Dausgaard. Elemental life forces are as well portrayed by the great orchestral works of Richard Strauss as they are by anyone or anything. Meanwhile, Rued Langgaard's strikingly original music, forged between his twin influences of Strauss and Nielsen, creates music of enormous power and beauty.

Thomas Dausgaard performed the premiere of Antichrist in Copenhagen in 2002. Besides Strauss and Nielsen, this Prelude also reminds me of Hans Pfitzner's three preludes to Palestrina, written in the same year, 1915, as An Alpine Symphony. By the way, this performance of the Antichrist Prelude is a world premiere of the original version of the piece. At more than 12 minutes, it's more compelling as a stand-alone concert piece than the six-minute operatic prelude Dausgaard performed as part of his 2006 recording of the complete opera from Copenhagen.

This is music that plays to the strengths of the Seattle Symphony: rich and powerful brass, sumptuous strings, lithe and subtle woodwinds, everything ready for Dausgaard to put together into a rich orchestral tapestry. The recordings were made from live concerts in 2017 (Strauss) and April, 2019 (Langgaard), and the sound is of the highest quality, which we've come to expect from these Seattle Symphony Media recordings. Another absolute winner from the Emerald City.

This album will be released on September 13, 2019