Most genuinely re-creative interpreters are also composers, and so it's particularly interesting to experience the 'first-hand' ideas of musicians whose reputations are otherwise founded on their performing skills. Very occasionally, revelations are such that the tables are turned—with Igor Markevitch for instance, whose creative output is in my opinion, actually more important than his work as a conductor. Artur Schnabel provides another case where the creative spark yielded more than is commonly acknowledged, whereas Rachmaninov's considerable creative and recreative skills have usually received well-balanced critical acclaim.
However, great conductors traditionally harbour a mass of secret repertory: Furtwangler Klemperer, Walter, Weingartner Martinon Dorati, Paray and of course, Rafael Kubelik, all of whom have produced works worth hearing. The interesting point here is that very often traits inherent in a particular conductor's creative style (and influences) run parallel with elements in his recreative personality. For example, the malleable temperament evident in Furtwangler's Second Symphony is already familiar from his Wagner and Bruckner performances, while Klemperer's uncompromising sense of the monumental (witness the First Symphony) is inherent in his bold creative arsenal, and Kubelik's fluid, highly eventful writing recalls parallel attributes in his readings of virtually everything from Mozart to Schoenberg. If there is a fault worth mentioning—and here again one can coextend the argument to criticisms of certain Kubelik performances—it is a tendency to miss the wood for the trees.
The Orphikon symphony is mightily impressive: a bold, dramatic piece, the first movement of which starts out to a mysterious, irregular pulse and works its way through a wildly disruptive development (replete with whooping horns and high-pitched drums) to a haunting coda that suggests a meeting of battle-scarred survivors. The powerful Adagio opens with a chorale-canon then proceeds to a gritty central passacaglia, while the finale which, according to Panton's annotation, Kubelik thinks of as ''life'' revisits earlier material and ends in a spirit of hard-won affirmation. His imaginative orchestration makes maximum use of low winds, brass and percussion (a varied and impressive line-up), whereas in the equally dramatic, 22-minute Cantata without Words inspired by Lao Tse and the Bhagavad Gita—Kubelik's choral forces enter with Penderecki-style glissandos. The disc's brightest component arrives last, with the Inventions and Interludes for children's choir, four oboes and four trumpets, composed in 1946 and providing a neo-classical contrast to the richly expressive neo-romanticism of its disc companions.
I played this CD three or four times, always with considerable pleasure. The temptation to insist on probable influences—which in this case include Berg, Martinu, Bartok, Janacek, Hindemith, Prokofiev, Roussel, Stravinsky, Ravel, Dvorak and Suk—seems to me particularly unhelpful in the case of a conductor, someone who is naturally expected to churn out 'Kapellmeister' music. Kubelik's work is certainly far more than that, with a range of sounds, motives and perspectives that bear witness to a particularly rich musical imagination, and if a tendency to discursiveness sometimes blurs structural contours, then atmosphere and emotion invariably provide compensation. The composer's performances are predictably sympathetic, while the recordings (Munich, 1981-4; Prague, 1990) are more than adequate.'