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.

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!