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Langgaard: Music Of The Spheres/Four Tone Pictures

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Rued Langgaard was the man that time forgot. Completely neglected in his native Denmark because he did not fall within the prevailing neo-classic aesthetic set by Nielsen, Langgaard was rediscovered in the 60s when Per Norgard gave a score of Music of the Spheres to Gyorg Ligeti at a competition and after a minute Ligeti announced, "it seems as though I am a Langgaard imitator." Though Langgaard was essentially a conservative late romantic composer, he was capable of some real moments of innovation. He not only presaged Ligeti's color style, but also elements of minimalism, most especially in his string quartets.

Music of the Spheres is Langgaard at his most original. This work is a stunning series of small tone pictures. From the very beginning of the work, with the shimmering cluster of string harmonies over ominous timpani, through out the work, experiment reigns. Langgaard is always tonal, but in this work shows a fascination with orchestral sound and tonal clusters that was probably about 50 years ahead of the times. And yet, in the middle of the work there are sections that could come directly from Schonberg's early Gurrelieder or even the symphonies of Gade. It is a truly astonishing aural sound feast and should be a staple of the repertoire.

The accompanying Tone Pictures, four tone poems on nature themes, are also quite beautiful, though much more conventional as music. Here is Langgaard the Romantic and he is quite a good Romantic actually. The orchestrations are lush, the harmony sensuous and there is just enough oddness to mark the work as Langgaard's and no one else's.

This Chandos disc is exemplary in sound and the performance by Rozhdestvensky is definitive I think. Even if you are afraid of unusual or experimental work, this is a disc that you can take to your heart. It is stunning and beautiful and has my highest recommendation.

This Chandos disc containing two pieces by Danish composer Rued Langgaard is one of the most pleasant surprises this fan of modern-classical music has come across. Langgaard (1893-1952) was an outsider and eccentric in Danish music life, a virtuoso organist who succeeded only in his late forties at getting a position, and a composer of wild tales of the Antichrist coming into the world who found it almost impossible to get his music played. In the late 1960s, his music was rediscovered by scholars and his importance in Danish musical history is now certain, but he is still little-known in the modern-classical scene. We should be grateful to the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra & Choir and Gennady Rozhdestvensky for their performance and to Chandos for releasing the recording.

"Music of the Spheres" for soprano, chorus, orchestra, and distant orchestra (1916-1918) is stunning. The innovations here are considerable: exploiting the performance space in the use of two orchestras, writing for an "open" piano where glissandi are produced directly on the strings, and of course the clusters and polyphonic webs, massive and seemingly motionless blocks of sound reminiscent of Gyorgy Ligeti. Indeed, the Hungarian composer exclaimed that he was a Langaard imitator when Per Norgard showed him a copy of the score in 1968. But the purity of the string writing reminds me of Alexander Knaifel, and the massive proportions of the orchestral writing at its loudest is somewhat like Sandstroem's "The High Mass".

But, as is often said, it wouldn't matter how much Langgaard were ahead of his time in "Music of the Spheres" if the music wasn't great. And it is, one of the most moving half-hours of orchestral music I'm acquainted with. Langgaard was a Romantic in a time when Romanticism was out of fashion, and the proportions of what the listener may recognize as struggle, momentary defeat, and victory are just as powerful as in Mahler.

"Music of the Spheres" is an exceptional piece in Langgaard's total output. The "Four Tone Pictures" for soprano and orchestra are somewhat more typical of his art. Written on poems by J. Blicher-Clausen, Ivan Turgeniev, and Holger Drachmann, they are fairly tame lieder. These suggest that the modern-classical fan can pass on most of Langgaard's music, but "Music of the Spheres" is so good that at least this disc should be in your collection.

This was another recommendation to broaden my musical horizons. I won't dwell on 20th century Danish composer Rued Langgaard's supposed bitterness toward his lifetime lack of renown and the success of his contemporary Carl Nielsen, only that it's an interesting footnote for the modern listener. I will say that Langgaard's Music of the Spheres from 1918 is an incredibly exhilarating indulgence, redolent of those "celestial" musical qualities one would think of being more akin to the post-WWII period and not necessarily The Great War -- one is immediately reminded of Ligeti's similar musical utterances of nearly fifty years hence, moreso than anything from Holst's The Planets. In fact, the CD notes by Bendt Viinholt Nielsen do bring up how Ligeti, upon first viewing the score while serving on a jury in 1968, openly stated how his and Langgaard's compositional techniques were so similar as to suggest that he might be a Langgaard imitator! We hear otherworldly tone clusters, predominately from the high strings and winds, as well as a colorful plethora of orchestral sounds from brass to organ to bells, often accented and offset by the omnipresent tympani. One can't help but think that Langgaard, in composing this work, was thinking well ahead of his time.

Toward the latter third of the roughly thirty-five minute work, whose many brief parts are given fanciful titles such as "Like Sunbeams on a Coffin Decorated with Sweet-Smelling Flowers", is the appearance of near nonsensical vocals from soprano and then chorus melodically repeating "Do re mi fa sol la-a!" as if we're being treated to a Freudian glimpse at composer's block. (Ever see Jack Nicholson at the typewriter in The Shining?) After a romantically tinged bit from the soprano, beautifully sung, the work ends with an exciting and colorful orchestral and choral apocalypse! One is hard-pressed to decipher an intelligible program in all this; however, I like how it's described in the notes as "a singular musical concept in which sound and space are in focus on behalf of a logical or organic form"...whatever in the cosmos THAT may mean! In any case, as I stated earlier, it's an indulgence, but it's still exhilarating and often mindblowing fun!

The Four Tone Pictures, dating from around the same period, are songs for soprano and orchestra which come from a different, more earthbound Late Romantic compositional realm, expressively sung by Sjöberg. They each carry titles and lyrics summoning nature and are thoroughly delightful. The entire CD is rendered in Chandos' finest, most vivid recorded sound.

An amazing album. To sum up "Music of the Spheres," I will quote the notes that come with the CD: "Langgaard's work focuses on space, height and depth, light and shadow, foreground and background. It does not constitute musical process, but a succession of spatial episodes most often of a repetitive static nature. Or, as the composer himself expresses it, 'In Music of the Spheres I have completely given up everything one understands by themes, consistency, form and continuity. It is music veiled in black and impenetrable mists of death.'" Although a work foreshadowing modernism, it has religious aspirations and is mostly meditative but sometimes enthralling. The other piece, Four Tone Pictures, is a more conventional and lush Romantic song cyclic.

Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) was a musical maverick if there ever was one. Much of his (especially later) music is deliberately derivative, some of it never venturing beyond Schumann's style and deliberately lapsing into banality. Some of it, however, and in particular Sfærernes musik given here, is as visionary as any music composed by anyone at the time. Langgaard was never part of the musical mainstream (he had a particular aversion toward Carl Nielsen), but has certainly entered it the last couple of years, with all of his symphonies and in fact the main bulk of his output now available on disc, often in several recordings.

In any case, the Music of the Spheres is certainly the place to start exploring his music. Composed in 1916-18, it is essentially a late romantic work taking more than a cue from Richard Strauss and the European fin-de-siecle style of the time; but the result sounds like nothing else. In this mystically romantic framework Langgaard deploys experimental techniques, such as tone-clusters, not heard afterwards before the sixties (Ligeti, in particular) to create a sonic spectacular with aural effects not resembling anything else at all, and yet the result is a remarkably attractive, intimate and compelling work. There are plenty of remarkable scoring and textural effects; the music is buzzing, slithering, passionate, surging upwards in inverted maelstroms of sound, generating remarkable ornaments, creating echoes with off-stage instrumental groups, rich, Mahlerian and radiant. Interestingly, however, the instrumentation stays clear and uncluttered (the voices are used sparingly). But there is no use trying to describe the effects; it really has to be heard.

The Four Tone Pictures, a song-cycle for soprano and orchestra, are more conventional but wonderfully lush, otherworldly and mysteriously late-romantic and atmospheric with a lavish, almost hazy scoring. They are very well sung by Gitta-Maria Sjöberg, and the orchestra is on top form throughout - that also goes for the main work. The Danish National Radio SO under Gennadi Rozhdestvensky has clearly taking their time to ponder and prepare this unusual music, and the results are stunningly played and convincingly interpreted. The sound is warm and clear. I do not know the alternative performances, but in some version or other this is music you just have to hear.