Polski Nowoczesny (Polish Modern): Witold Lutoslawski: Fanfare for Louisville (Lawrence Leighton Smith), Krzystof Penderecki: De Natura Sonoris No. 2 (Jorge Mester), Stanislaw Skrowaczewski: Music At Night (John Nelson), Andrzej Panufnik: Nocturne, Alexandre Tansman: Capriccio, Karol Rathaus: Prelude op. 71 (Robert Whitney). The Louisville Orchestra. First Edition Music FECD-1909 (2006) barcode 809157190929
Rathaus recorded VI.54, Columbia Auditorium, Louisville
Tansman recorded IV.55, Columbia Auditorium, Louisville
Panufnik recorded 9.V.65, Macauley Theatre, Louisville
Penderecki recorded 17.V.72, Macauley Theatre, Louisville
Skrowaczewski recorded 28.IV.81, Robert Whitney Hall, Louisville
Lutoslawski recorded 29.IV.87, Robert Whitney Hall, Louisville (venue indicated in LCD005)
Lutoslawsi previously released on First Edition Recordings LCD005 (1990)
Panufnik previously released on First Edition Music FECD-0017 (2003)
Clever and interesting compilation of Louisville-performed 20th Century Polish composers
Originally posted on Amazon.com, 11 November 2007
There is a genuine, clever, sensible, cultured and musical mind at work behind these Louisville Orchestra reissues made by the Santa Fe-based First Edition Music – or should I write “was”, as alas the company seems to have ceased its operations? Anyway, these reissues represent a welcome break with the time-honored Louisville tradition, as they present highly coherent programs that fit snugly in one’s music library. For all that the Louisville LP releases on the house label First Edition Records (and the first CDs that came out in the late 1980s and early 1990s under the auspices of Albany and of the orchestra’s own label now called First Edition Recordings – see my Louisville CD-discography for the details and links, link will open new tab) brought to the recorded legacy of 20th Century music of all schools and styles, one of their drawbacks was their motley programs and apparent haphazard bringing together on a single LP or CD of composers with hardly any stylistic or personal ties. When The Santa Fe Music Group acquired and started releasing the Louisville catalog in the early 2000s on their label First Edition Music, they did so in the form of monographs, discs devoted to a single composer, collating Louisville recordings made at different times and thus usually offering fine overviews of the composer’s development. In some of them, obviously for lack of material in the Louisville catalog, the total time was frustratingly short, anywhere between 40 and 50-minutes, but, at the cheap price demanded for most of them on your favorite online commercial website, that was a small downside in the face of the coherence and interest of the compilations.
But what to do when there wasn’t enough music of a composer in the Louisville catalog to fill even that? Well, the mastermind in charge of artistic decisions at First Edition has cleverly and tastefully gathered four collections devoted respectively to “British Modern” (FECD-1904 with works of Bliss, Rubbra, Arnold and Addison), “Français Moderne” (FECD-1906 with compositions of Honegger and Ibert), “Magyar Modern” (FECD-1911, Kodaly, Antal Dorati as composer and Mathias Seiber – links will open new tab to my reviews) and this one, devoted to 20th-Century Polish composers. The styles range from 1970s avant-garde (Penderecki) to Mahler-influenced (Rathaus) by way of un-aggressive 20th-Century modern (Panufnik, Skrowaczewski, Tansman) and determinedly 20th-Century modern (Lutoslawski) – a fine tribute to Louisville’s eclecticism.
Lutoslawski‘s Fanfare was commissioned for the 50th Anniversary of the Louisville Orchestra. It is a tremendously powerful explosion of brass. 1:17 of it is just too short. The composition has made a previous appearance on CD, on the Louisville Orchestra’s short-lived CD label First Edition Recordings, coupled with works by Husa and Creston (LCD005, link to my review).
In the late 1970s Penderecki turned from being one of the major figures of the European avant-garde to a neo-Romantic conservative. In a radio interview made in the early 1980s, to the question “why ?” I heard him answer rhetorically “how long can one remain a modernist?” Well, Lutoslawski and Ligeti remained true to their modernist self until the end, Elliott Carter is turning 100 and still kicking and George Crumb is not far behind, and they are piling extraordinarily inventive, dramatic, engaging works on top of the other. What has been lost with Penderecki’s abdication of that kind of integrity can be heard with his De Natura Sonoris No. 2 from 1971. It is exactly that: extraordinarily inventive, dramatic and engaging. Why COULDN’T Penderecki remain a modern? Too much effort?
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski‘s reputation in the US lies so much on his conducting tenures that one forgets that he started has a composer, and his “Music of Night” (1949, revised in 1960) shows how promising he was. In fact, it sounds kind of like the music the conservative Penderecki composes – which I find more acceptable in the 1940s and `50s than in the `80s and after. It is powerful and dramatic, with subtle and refined nocturnal moments. The only reservation one can express is that it doesn’t display a particularly distinctive style, in the way that any Hindemith or Bartok or Martinu is immediately recognizable. You can compare it to the early music of Karel Husa, for instance, or the symphonies of Karl Amadeus Hartmann.
There are more than a few stylistic links between Skrowaczewksi’s composition and Andrzej Panufnik‘s Nocturne. They are both representative of a modernist but non avant-garde style, going for the angst and drama, slightly dissonant but not gratingly so. The Nocturne is in arch form, beginning in an eerie and mysterious atmosphere of softly whispering percussions and slowly moving through gently rocking melodies of almost neo-romantic tinge at times, until it reaches a steep climactic peak around the 7-to-10-minute mark, then receding back in palindrome form to the reverse of its beginning. It is orchestrated with much refinement. If on a blind test I had been told it was music of, say, William Schuman, I wouldn’t have balked. The same recording was already reissued on First Edition Music’s Panufnik disc, FECD-0017 (link to my review) with the composer’s Rhapsody and Symphony No. 2 “Elegiaca”. Since it was already made avvailable there, it makes you wonder why they reissued it on their Polish collection: probably because they didn’t have any other Polish composer in their vaults to fill a complete CD.
Alexandre Tansman‘s Capriccio from 1954 (a Louisville commission) is slightly more backward-looking in style, with its brash and colourful opening “Ballade” sometimes evocative of Paul Dukas’ Sorcerer’s Apprentice and then strongly reminiscent of the pounding syncopations of Le Sacre‘s Danses Sacrales (1:08), its evocative and dreamy Notturno, its lively and Petrushka-esque closing Scherzo.
A pupil of the famous Franz Schreker in Berlin, Karol Rathaus fled Germany in 1932 (he was subsequently one of the composers whose music was branded by the Nazis as “degenerate”) and established first in Paris and London, before emigrating in 1940 to the United States, where he died in 1954. But what might have been interesting and maybe provocative in the 1920s wasn’t so much in more in the 1950s. His 1953 Prelude for orchestra (another Louisville commission) is a somewhat bombastic orchestral showpiece in post-mahlerian style.
The recording dates range from 1954-5, somewhat distant but clear mono (Rathaus and Tansman) to 1981 and 1987 up-to-date stereo (Skrowaczewski, Lutoslawski). Good, informative notes.
And a postscript from January 2012: good news/bad news. The good news is that Louisville and the Santa Fe Music Group are back in business, and they seem to have finally released the complete Louisville catalog. The bad news is that it is on download only. Go to downloads and type Louisville Soundmark, it yields 58 results, some the straight reissues of the corresponding CD, but most new (and clever) compilations.