LANGGAARD Music of the Abyss
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Genre:
Chamber
Label: Dacapo
Magazine Review Date: 10/2021
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 76
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: 8 226152
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Wind Septet |
Rued Langgaard, Composer
Esbjerg Ensemble |
Augustiana |
Rued Langgaard, Composer
Esbjerg Ensemble |
In the Flowering Time (I Blomstringstiden) |
Rued Langgaard, Composer
Esbjerg Ensemble |
Scherzo after 'Ach du lieber Augustin' |
Rued Langgaard, Composer
Esbjerg Ensemble |
Lenau Moods (Lenaustemninger) |
Rued Langgaard, Composer
Esbjerg Ensemble |
Humoresque |
Rued Langgaard, Composer
Esbjerg Ensemble |
Music of the Depths, 'Afgrundsmusik' |
Rued Langgaard, Composer
Esbjerg Ensemble |
Author: Andrew Mellor
Even in his twenties – his acclaimed Symphony No 1 already introduced to the world by the Berlin Philharmonic – the fractured, reactionary personality that would sprout inside Rued Langgaard and grapple for full control of his music for the next four decades was making itself felt. This selection of music for winds, strings and voice written between 1913 and 1924 is as disorientating, erratic and inconsistent as its creator.
As so often with Langgaard, Nielsen looms large – in retrospect and reaction. Langgaard’s Septet (1915) seems a premonition of Nielsen’s Wind Quintet of seven years later in its presentation of a chorale (‘Nu hviler mark og enge’, or ‘O sacred head, sore wounded’) and its obvious folk influence, but the piece pushes against its formal boundaries despite wanting to conjure an idyll. Like everything here, it is performed with character and buoyancy by the Esbjerg Ensemble.
The first of two ‘humorous’ works written for hygge at home with the tobacco manufacturer Christian Augustinus could be said to loftily dismiss Nielsen’s own folk-fiddle tradition as bumpkin music, further evidence that Langgaard is at his most amusing when unintentionally so, ranting ideologically in musical form. Augustinusiana (1914) is far bolder than its companion piece of a year earlier with the same provenance, Scherzo on the Motifs C A and ‘Ach, du lieber Augustin’.
Nielsen is back in the frame in the Humoreske (1923), a wound-up piece composed as Langgaard waited for the Royal Danish Theatre to approve his opera Antikrist (it didn’t, though incidentally the Deutsche Oper Berlin will stage the work this coming February). It opens with a chorale marked ‘really ugly’ and ratchets up tension, the flute losing it while a snare drum mocks and irritates on the sidelines. Humorous? That pivots very much on your opinion of Nielsen’s Symphony No 5; in Langgaard’s case, the snare drum ultimately induces a consonant, placid wind chord. Go figure.
Six mystic-religious songs with string quartet accompaniment are sung intensely by Signe Asmussen, the strings fluid and rhapsodically anchorless underneath her, a direct reflection of hazy texts that speak of ‘the dreams of deep bells’ – all part of Langgaard’s anti-Nielsen, anti-Thomas Laub campaign to inject mysticism and atmosphere into religious music, liturgical or otherwise. Of course, that process reached its climax with Antikrist itself, of which Music of the Abyss is an offcut. It obsesses over a motif from Liszt’s B minor Sonata before being ‘torn apart by a foaming insanity’ (to borrow an irresistible phrase from annotator Esben Tange, director of the Rued Langgaard Festival in Ribe). But there is a danger, in Allan Gravgaard Madsen’s arrangement for the Esbjerg Ensemble’s 11 players, that Langgaard’s fervent ranting becomes a pantomime. I personally miss the percussive, hammering power of the piano. Then again, it may be that Madsen’s arrangement allows us to hear the music more than the man – a refreshing standpoint in the case of a composer we all love to caricature.
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