Igor Markevitch (1912 - 1983) - Cantique d'Amour (1936) Arnhem Philharmonic Orchestra, Christopher Lyndon-Gee (1995) Primarily remembered today as a conductor, Igor Markevitch also composed a number of works from 1925 to 1941 and was considered one of the leading composers of the time, receiving praise from Bartók, Milhaud, and Poulenc. Cantique d'Amour (Hymn to Love) is a short orchestral work dating from 1936, five years before he gave up composing and devoted his efforts exclusively to conducting. "When, after an interval of nearly forty years, Markevitch again heard Cantique d'Amour towards the end of his life, he gently rebuked it for having too much 'magic' and for sounding 'too good'. This short composition, orchestrated with a luxuriant vocabulary worthy of Ravel, feather-bedded with harmony redolent of Skryabin, is unique in his output. Its rich language was soon rejected for the astringent, almost violently energetic classicism of Le Nouvel Âge as he prepared to enter his own New Age, an age of performing the music of others, untrammelled by what had become the burden of his own creativity. Cantique d’Amour was commissioned, like Partita and Hymnes, by Winnaretta Singer, the Princesse de Polignac, and first performed in Rome in May 1937 by the Augusteo Orchestra under Mario Rossi. Subsequently, it was not heard again until 1980. It is a simple arch with coda, beginning and ending in a meandering forest of bird-song within an evocation of wind and filtered light. The apex of the arch, a violently energetic storm of passion full of rushing scales in the strings and soaring melodies in the trumpets, soon subsides into the languor of the opening. It is the coda that looks forward to Le Nouvel Âge; chords in harmonics in the violas and cellos, doubled by celesta and glockenspiel, locked on the same unresolved dominant seventh that will conclude the later work. This is an ending that subsumes the lushness of the music that preceded it into a conclusion that is both exquisitely poised and infinitely 'cold'. Cold is a word that has sometimes come to mind in response to the music of this man; the same man who in 1972 would tell dance critic John Gruen 'No, I don’t want to talk about my life, or my music—I don’t want the world to know!'. The same man who quelled the passion of his 'love-song' within a work which remains essentially detached." (source: Naxos) ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW8wfpTvJw8

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901 - 1953) - Suite No. 2 for Four Strings and Piano (1929) I. Lento [0:00] II. Leggiero [3:01] III. Allegro energico [4:54] Evan Paris & Linda Quan, violin Lois Martin, viola Madeleine Shapiro, cello Aleck Karis, piano (1998) Ruth Crawford's Suite No. 2 for Four Strings and Piano, written in 1929, is a work in three movements typically lasting around 10 minutes. "The three-movement Suite No. 2 projects a sense of cyclic unity by virtue both of recurrences of the opening nine measures in later movements and generation of the musical material from a few key motives. The first movement begins so softly and in such a low range that it is barely audible, its chromatic ostinatos in the piano and low strings supporting five disjointed, brief thematic gestures in the two violins. Crawford’s understated opening, though without the single-tone sign, suggests her spiritual aesthetics. Varied repeats of this fragmentary opening material recur – at the end of the second movement and again at the end of the entire piece. The placement of the two repetitions at such crucial points suggests that the three movements may also be considered two larger statements enclosed by similar material: the first two movements, though varied in character, are concentrated and brief, lasting together about five minutes, while the third lasts as long as the first two together. The final movement is bold, improvisatory, and quixotic, with many changes of mood and tempo. By restating the opening material as a concluding refrain, Crawford reins in its bravado, reasserting the more serious mood of the beginning. Crawford’s Suite No. 2 shows a considerable advance in her handling of thematic development, a matter she had found problematic in much modern music including her own. And the ostinato layers, often exposed in Music for Small Orchestra, yield to a more authoritative handling of textures and to finely argued and organically unified part writing, powerful and extended thematic statements, and more skillful use of imitative polyphony. Crawford’s heightened interest in counterpoint indicates new compositional priorities in which linear exploration replaced the harmonic preoccupations of her earlier music. When Henry Cowell recommended that she go to New York to study with his former teacher, Charles Seeger, he steered her toward an American modernist’s solution to the problem of thematic development: Seeger’s method of dissonant counterpoint. Her formal studies with Seeger began in November 1929 during the time Suite No. 2 was being written. One unmistakable source of the surer technique of the Suite No. 2 is Crawford’s command of dissonant counterpoint as handled by Cowell, her mentor in Chicago, and Carl Ruggles – both of whom were inf ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkeN8ObfWZs

Alexander Mosolov (1900 - 1973) - Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 3 (1924) Steffen Schleiermacher, piano (2014) Mosolov's first piano sonata is a single-movement sonata in C minor, typically lasting around 10-12 minutes. "Mosolov’s Piano Sonata No. 1 in C minor, Op. 3 (1924) is in a single span and opens slowly and rather gloomily as the composer slowly lays out a motif, soon overtaken by a rush of dramatic chords as the opening idea is developed through passages of intense complexity and virtuosity with this pianist rising magnificently to the many challenges. Soon the music drops to a quiet and thoughtful section though the toil, the turmoil and the drama are never far away. It subtly increases in forward drive through sudden outbursts with this pianist showing terrific fluidity in passages of powerful complexity, drawing undoubtedly on late Scriabin to a coda where the power seems to drain away for a quiet end." (source: http://theclassicalreviewer.blogspot.com/2016/05/outstanding-performances-from-olga.html) Original audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjjL-_RT_AM ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY-1KuPIEzc

Frank Bridge (1879 - 1941) - Phantasm, Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra (1931) Howard Shelley, piano BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Richard Hickox (2002) Frank Bridge's Phantasm is a piece for piano and orchestra, one of Bridge's two concertante works. It is in a single movement and typically lasts around 26 minutes. "Phantasm of 1931 inhabits a spectral world of dreams and ghostly apparitions. It is a piano concerto in all but name. The soloist’s part may not be ‘showy’ in a pianistic way, as it is in the concerto composed the previous year by Bridge’s exact contemporary John Ireland, but the piano is still the first among equals. Bridge was inspired to compose Phantasm after hearing Hindemith’s Concert Music, Op. 49 for piano, two harps and brass in November 1930 at Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge’s Chicago Festival. Bridge was at the festival for the American premiere of his Piano Trio (1929). He was impressed with the pianist Emma Lübbecke-Job’s playing of the solo part and conducted a performance of the work for the BBC with her as soloist the following March. As soon as Bridge had returned home, he began work on a concertante work of his own, in the hope that Mrs Coolidge – who had supported him for eight years – would produce it when her globetrotting festival arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1932. In the event the Coolidge Festivals in Europe were confined to chamber music, and Phantasm was consigned to his bottom drawer until January 1934, when Kathleen Long premiered it at the BBC British Music Festival in the Queen’s Hall with the composer conducting. Bridge describes Phantasm as a Rhapsody, not because it is loose or rambling in form but because of its unconventional single-movement plan. It has more in common with the phantasies that Bridge had composed in his younger days, and with chamber pieces like the Rhapsody Trio for two violins and viola of 1928, than with any work in the traditional concerto form. At the outset two related ideas flash by like ghostly apparitions: they are to provide the thematic basis for the whole work. In an extended slow introduction the soloist ‘improvises’ on them, outlining clearer lyrical shapes. The piano then leads the orchestra into the first Allegro episode. A ghostly, modal march theme is supported by a dissonant ostinato. The strange visions gradually come into focus. Then the orchestra begins a macabre, spectral waltz, but as Bridge’s whole tone chords and tritone-based polychords disperse, melodic shapes become more clearly defined, tonality grows more stable, and a graceful ‘waltz’ emerges as the second subject. The piano soon snuffs it out, however, and leads the orchestra into a development of the lyrical material of the introduction. The dialogues between the p ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJNZZzZfHg