Music at an odd angle

Rued Langgaard: The String Quartets

DaCapo is releasing a box set of Rued Langgaard's complete string quartets, recorded from 2010 to 2013, and released as three single discs during that period. I reviewed volume 3, the final disc in the series, back in 2015, and I couldn't be more positive about the Nightingale String Quartet's performances and DaCapo's recordings and presentation. As to the music itself, I'm an even bigger fan of Langgaard now that I'm more familiar with his symphonies, and his splendid opera The Antichrist.

This splendid portrait of the Nightingale String Quartet, included in DaCapo's really excellent liner notes, is by Nikolaj Lund, who has made a specialty of photographing classical musicians in new and surprising contexts and poses. But I like to think that this pose has a musical relevance as well; Langgaard's music is oddly out of phase within 20th century classical music. It's at an odd angle, if you will, to the various trends and orthodoxies of music in the 1900s, and that's partly why I find him so appealing. Kudos to these excellent musicians and to DaCapo for such a marvellous survey of this very fine music.




This bargain-priced three-CD album will be released on November 15, 2019.

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

Except in his own town

Rued Langgaard: Symphonies no. 2 & 6; Jacob Gade: Tango Jalousie

Here's a common problem among artists and Messiahs:

Jesus said to them, 'A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.' - Mark 6:4

Rued Langgaard had not inconsiderable success in Germany and Austria, but his music never caught on at home in Denmark. So it's good to have this very fine disc from Europe's musical heartland, with Sakari Oramo conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, though I hasten to point out that the recording is published by DaCapo, "the Danish national label". So in that sense, Rued, you can go home again.

These are beautifully crafted symphonies, full of appealing melodies and interesting side-trips away from the main themes. "Digression is the sunshine of narrative," says Lawrence Stern, and further, Adam Phillips calls it "secular revelation." While you can hear some strains of the Great Dane Carl Nielsen in this music, and somewhat more Sibelius, it's Richard Strauss who comes most to mind, especially in the very fine 2nd Symphony, written in 1912-14. All three of those composers were born in the 1860s, while Langgaard is 30 years younger. It's no surprise that this relatively conservative but very appealing music, more or less untouched by modernism, was such a hit in central Europe before the Great War.

A lot of things were different after that conflict, of course, but Rued Langgaard's music kept to a certain path, and his somewhat prickly and difficult temperament kept him on the outs with the musical establishment at home. He set himself up in opposition to Carl Nielsen, but unlike in the great Jack Benny-Fred Allen feud to come, there seemed to be no benefit to either composer. This is really a marketing issue, though, since you can hear Langgaard's 6th Symphony from 1920 as a kind of response to Nielsen's 4th Symphony, written in 1916. The serious nature of this symphony speaks more to Langgaard's musical evolution, though, rather than any polemical agenda, as much as he aggressively promoted one or another for most of his life.

Both of these symphonies have moments of transfiguration, in the Richard Strauss tradition, but they're relatively short on light, and nearly devoid of real joy. This is serious music from a dour man, and I can't help comparing Rued Langgaard with a near contemporary prophet who also had problems at home, Heitor Villa-Lobos. In spite of many personal and artistic trials, Villa-Lobos was a true optimist whose music nearly always expresses the same joyful spirit of music itself, which he felt was embodied in, and expressed most perfectly through, Johann Sebastian Bach.

Perhaps in response to this dour hour, Sakari Oramo adds a delightful coda: the Tango Jalousie of another Danish composer, Jacob Gade. With their own light music always right at their finger-tips, the Viennese musicians provide us with an up-beat finale to a thoughtful but severe concert.

Character, charm and musical vision

Jens Cornelius, in his entertaining liner notes to this excellent new DaCapo disc of Danish Romantic Piano Trios, introduces Peter Erasmus Lange-Muller as “a sensitive soul from a fine old Copenhagen family.” That’s a tough place to start from in the rough and tumble world of classical music, where self-esteem is gold, and natural vigour can help make up for a lack of formal training or social graces (think of Beethoven or Villa-Lobos). Lange-Muller’s melodic gifts are on display in his Piano Trio of 1898, but he’s trying pretty hard to make his work something more than another salon piece. I quite like the results: amped-up romanticism in the outer movements, with a neurotic feel, verging on hysteria at times, in the finale. Lange-Muller mainly takes a break from fin-de-siecle angst in the lovely middle movement, letting the strings and piano share some beautiful, sad melodies. This piece has lots of character, and that’s due in part to the excellence of the newly formed group The Danish Piano Trio.

There’s character as well in the 1863 Piano Trio in F major by Niels Gade, but the composer is here more or less content to follow the models of his friends and mentors Mendelssohn and Schumann. This is well-composed, academically sound music that is redeemed by Gade’s natural charm and warmth. There’s even more charm in the piano trio movement the 22-year-old Gade wrote in 1939. The fact that he spins his slight material out for 12 minutes shows the prodigious talent of the young musician.

The final work on this very well-planned programme takes us to the brink of a completely new sound world. Rued Langgaard, probably second only to Carl Nielsen among Danish composers, wrote the Mountain Flowers movement for piano trio in 1908. It became a movement in Langgaard’s First Symphony, setting him on his way to greatness in composition but eventual obscurity that lasted until well after his death. With only hints of the long musical journey ahead, there’s a bracing backbone to his musical vision that belies the peaceful pre-war times in which it was written. The composer has the 20th century within him even then (at 15!); it was only a matter of time before his musical vision was fully expressed.

Character, charm and deep emotion

From February 3, 2015:

The Nightingale String Quartet bring their survey of the Rued Langgaard’s string quartets to a triumphant conclusion in this third volume from Dacapo. Langgaard’s career didn’t go smoothly, as he was completely out of synch with the musical trends of the 20th century. He was born too late, certainly, though I wonder if things would have gone well for him as a musician 50 years earlier. He sounds like a prickly sort of fellow, and completely uncompromising when it came to his musical vision. His brush with modernism is barely evident in the 1st quartet of 1914. The craggy bits are, I think, more connected to his crusty personality than any avant-garde tendencies. This first attempt at a full-scale chamber music work has an angry sadness, an expression perhaps of the emotions that accompanied his unsuccessful first love affair. In a fit of self-criticism Langgaard dismantled the work, discarding the last two movements and reusing the best bits of the rest in his fourth and fifth quartets, written in the mid-1920s. Later, though, he had second thoughts and put the work back together (from memory in the case of the 3rd and 4th movements). Perhaps this is why the music sounds so self-assured.

In the fifth quartet of 1926 Langgaard really turns back the clock to a Classical-Romantic idiom. The danger here is a kind of flabby nostalgia. I’m reminded of a CBC reviewer calling an Amadeus String Quartet recording of Sir Ernest MacMillan “kitsch Mendelssohn.” In this case, though, Langgaard polished up the work during the rest of the 20s, right through until 1938, when he felt it good enough to release into a very uncongenial environment. The music comes through the neo-Romantic tunnel full of character, charm and deep emotion.

Dacapo Records is on a roll lately; I’ve loved more than a few of their recent releases, especially the Danish String Quartet’s Wood Works, the New York Philharmonic’s Nielsen series, and now the Langgaard String Quartets. This is a label to watch!