Rued Langgaard was nothing if not prolific. There are 16 symphonies, seven string quartets and some 400 works in all. The recently-published annotated catalogue of his works by Bendt Viinholt Nielsen, published by Odense University Press (1991) runs to 560 well-filled pages! Regarded as something of an eccentric during his lifetime (1893-1952), his music underwent grievous neglect after some initial success and then suddenly enjoyed a posthumous vogue in the late 1960s. The Music of the Spheres, an extraordinary piece, which strikes me on one hearing as inspired and visionary, and on the next as mildly insane, caused quite a stir when it was revived. He has been hailed as a Danish Charles Ives or Havergal Brian, a comparison that is by no means inapt. First, let me say that this Chandos issue offers the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth symphonies in very persuasive and sympathetic performances by Neeme Jarvi and the Danish radio orchestra and very good recordings. But what of the music itself?
Like all of his symphonies, the Fourth (1916 revised 1920) carries a subtitle, Lovfald, variously translated as ''Fall of the Leaf'' and rather less romantically as ''Defoliation'' (as in the 1974 Danish EMI recording under John Frandsen). The Sixth, Det himmelrivende (1919-20 rev. 1928-30) derives its title (literally ''The storming of the heavens'' though it is translated ''Heavens Asunder'' here) from St Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, ''Then Jesus used force and drove the storming armies of evil under the canopy of heaven''. The first version of the Fifth comes from 1917-18 but was revised in 1926; Langgaard made a second version of it in 1931, between the Eighth and Ninth symphonies. Its subtitle, Steppenatur is variously translated as ''The Nature of the Steppes'' though in the first version of the score, it was called ''Drama Legend in Summer''. As Jorgen Falck has put it in a note to an earlier recording, his musical foundations rest on late romanticism and in his music you meet Liszt (his father, incidentally, was a pupil of Liszt) Mahler and Scriabin—to which he could have added in the case of the Fourth Symphony, Strauss. There are strong echoes of Elektra at one point, though it is to the Alpine Symphony that one's thoughts mostly turn (the titles of the various sections are ''Rustle in the forest'', ''Glimpse of the sun'', ''Thunderstorm'' etc.). There are even occasional glimpses of Nielsen, for whom he would seem to have nursed a mixture of paranoia and jealous antipathy. (The preface to a piece ironically entitled ''Carl Nielsen our great composer'' reads, ''For 40 years have suffered abuse by the Carl Nielsen Press; suffered Carl Nielsen on the radio; suffered having to hear, breathe, talk, sleep in this Carl Nielsen-dominated music-life; suffered reading about Felumb, Hamerik, Tarp, Holmboe etc.; suffered the decline and fall of our musical life for 58 years!)
For all his eclecticism his music exhibits some real qualities of imagination, vision even, alongside moments of conventional post-romantic rhetoric, yet there is no real symphonic coherence and little sense of what the Germans call Meisterschaft. The overall effect here and in the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies is overwhelmingly episodic. Those looking for the kind of musical nourishment and depth—and above all, sheer musical concentration you find in Nielsen and other Scandinavian masters will look here in vain. But this is not to deny that there are many things in all three symphonies to interest and stimulate, alongside much that is overblown. I would recommend them to those with inquiring minds and catholic tastes. (Danacord have embarked on a complete Langgaard symphony edition which will be reviewed in due course.)'