Cantus Arcticus, etc.

When I first moved to Karlskrona there were two branches of the Skivlagret record shop: the cooler one in the town centre and a blander one in an out-of-town mall in the same building as the Robin Hood supermarket. The latter location held a stock of budget Naxos classical releases, and it was thanks to these discs that I first got into the music of Shostakovich, and also, into the work of Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara.

There are three pieces on the CD, all featuring the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Hannu Lintu: 'Cantus Arcticus', a so-called 'concerto for birds and orchestra', with the former represented by tape-recordings of birdsong made in northern Finland. This is an immediately-accessible and beautiful composition, somewhat reminiscent of Sibelius. Next is the striking 'Piano Concerto No. 1', with Laura Mikkola the soloist, which is predominantly melodic, but with piquant 'cluster' chords on the piano made by applying a whole fist or forearm to the keyboard.

Lastly there is what is to me a less appealing work in the shape of Rautavaara's 'Symphony No. 3' - a piece which combines modernist serialism and 19th-century Germanic symphonic flavours. The first two works sufficed to get me interested in this composer and, while, I bought a good many more CDs of his work thereafter, and although there are probably better performances of these works elsewhere, I retain great affection for this album.

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Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...

This is a Recording

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