toccata finale with the brass section in full force behind the organ. Listen to ...
Concerto to Cassadó, and the cellist played in chamber ensembles with some of.
A Year in Classical Music: 1926, vol. 6 Of all the music composed in 1926, I’d name Leos Janáček’s Sinfonietta as the best piece. (We’ll get to Janáček in volume 8 of the 1926 shows.) After Janáček’s Sinfonietta, there are several other well-known masterworks that are close runners-up for Best Composition of 1926, to my mind, such as Enescu’s Violin Sonata no. 3, Bartók’s Out of Doors Suite for piano, and Berg’s Lyric Suite for string quartet. But of the lesser-known pieces that I hadn’t heard before I did the research for these 1926 shows, my favorite is the Symphonie Concertante for organ and orchestra by Joseph Jongen. Belgian organist and composer Joseph Jongen had fled to England during the First World War, living in Bournemouth and London. In 1920 he had returned to Brussels and been appointed professor of fugue and counterpoint at the Brussels Conservatory. In 1925 he was appointed director of the school. As a composer he thought of his style as international, as transcending nationalism; he’d studied composition with Richard Strauss at Berlin and Vincent d’Indy at Paris and had taken cues and influences from the whole canon of European classical music. He composed substantive works for all instruments and many genres; but today it is his organ music that is still performed. His Symphonie Concertante of 1926 is one of only a few great scores for organ and orchestra, and deserves to be much better known. It’s beautifully orchestrated, and it’s harmonically very colorful. After the symphonic opening movement come a divertimento second movement with a lighter, chamber music quality, a shimmering and mysterious Largo third movement with the organ kept mostly to a supporting role, and a triumphant toccata finale with the brass section in full force behind the organ. Listen to the recording by organist Michael Murray with the San Francisco Symphony, under Edo de Waart. It was made in 1984 soon after a huge and powerful Ruffatti pipe organ was installed in San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall that year, and you also get two solo organ works by César Franck on the album. A good second choice is the reading by organist Patrick Wedd with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, who measure up well to the better-known American ensemble. Next up is the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck. (The name is a little difficult to pronounce for an English speaker, but I believe I’m pretty close in saying “shook,” but adding a little ‘e’ to the vowel: Schoeck. If not, then my apologies to any German speaking listeners.) In 1923, Schoeck had visited Arthur Honegger in Paris, where he became acquainted for the first time with the music of the French avant-garde, as well as that of Stravinsky and Berg. The experience had initiated a crisis for the then 37 year-old Schoeck, making him suddenly and acutely aware of how conservative his own music was, and of how isolated he had been in Zürich from the leading edge of European musical style. He had quickly distanced himself from his earlier style, which had drawn on Schumann, Brahms, and especially Hugo Wolf, and begun to incorporate Modernist techniques into his compositions.
The year 1926 saw the composition of a through-composed song cycle for baritone and large orchestra, on Gottfried Keller’s poem Lebendig Begraben. “Lebendig begraben” means “buried alive.” Keller’s poem depicts the thoughts of a man who wakes from a coma to find himself inside a coffin, buried beneath the ground. At first he is terrified, of couse, but then he begins to think back on his childhood and his youth, he thinks of his love for a young woman he never had the courage to speak to, and by the end of the piece he gives up his spirit with an affirmation of joy directed to a pantheistic god. The last line of the poem is translated, “Farewell, O Self, transitory idol! Whoever you are farewell!” (The great novelist James Joyce, though, wrote that Keller’s poem is satirical, and only “semi-pious.”) Schoeck composed Lebendig Begraben mostly in his head. He would sit at the piano with a copy of Keller’s poem on the stand — not a note of written music — and play and sing his setting for people. In the summer of 1926 he played and sang the music for the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. When Schoeck was finished, Furtwängler’s comment was, “What about my good German public?” The modernity of the music surprised Furtwängler, and Schoeck interpreted his reaction to mean that Furtwängler wasn’t interested in the piece. But then, in October, Furtwängler wrote to Schoeck requesting the score and parts. Unfortunately Schoeck wasn’t finished orchestrating the piece, which is largely atonal and has to be treated differently by an orchestrator than tonal music would — Schoeck had to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, at every turn. So Schoeck turned Furtwängler down, and Furtwängler never did conduct the piece. Schoeck completed the orchestration in November of ’26, though, and his struggles with it were worthwhile; his score is a great masterpiece of writing for orchestra. It was premiered the following March, with Schoeck conducting. Schoeck’s setting of Lebendig Begraben is his masterpiece. Today, it owes its reputation to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s 1962 recording with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. If I asked you to list the great cellists of the 20th century, you’d probably name Pablo Casals, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pierre Fournier, Jacqueline Dupré, Yo-Yo Ma. One you might not be familiar with, but who should definitely make the list, is the Spaniard Gaspar Cassadó. He’d emerged as a leading international soloist in 1918, just after the end of the Great War, and following his studies with Casals. The British composer Arnold Bax would dedicate his Cello Concerto to Cassadó, and the cellist played in chamber ensembles with some of the finest musicians of his time — Arthur Rubinstein, Yehudi Menuhin, and Joseph Szigeti (yoh-sef see-geh-tee), among others. Cassadó played a 1709 Stradivarius cello that had been owned previously by Luigi Boccherini, the Italian cellist and composer who’d lived in Spain for most of his career. Cassadó’s old-school recordings are still available today; some are online at Spotify and Classical Archives, so there’s something to explore if you’d like to get know some old-time recordings.
Now, Casals was for many the greatest cellist of the 20th century, so for all of Cassadó’s virtuosity he was second to his teacher as a player; but both men were composers as well, and in composition Cassadó outdid Casals. He studied with Ravel in Paris, and he took influences from his countryman Manuel de Falla and from Spanish folk music as well; Cassadó was an eclectic and cosmopolitan neo-Romantic who looked back to his teachers and to the previous century, not to the Modernist avant-garde of his day. The mid-1920’s was Cassadó’s most prolific period as a composer. In 1926 he wrote his Cello Concerto in D Minor, an encore piece for cello and piano that’s still popular today, called The Dance of the Green Devil, and a Piano Trio. Now the Cello Concerto isn’t what I was expecting. I assumed I’d hear bullfight music and fandango, I suppose, but the Concerto is the least overtly Spanish-sounding of Cassadó’s three 1926 pieces. There’s a little Spanish thematic material, but it draws more from French Impressionism, and in some passages it uses pentatonic melodies with an Asian character. The Cassadó Cello Concerto is a distinctive essay in orchestral music. It’s off the beaten path of the classical music sound-world, I’d say; it makes a unique impression, and it’s the only one of Cassadó’s cello concertos that’s an original work, as the others are transcriptions of pieces by Mozart, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, and others. In 2001 cellist Martin Ostertag recorded Cassadó’s Cello Concerto in D Minor with the Baden-Baden Philharmonic and conductor Werner Stiefel. Both cello and orchestra are very well recorded and the performance is heartfelt, and it’s the only recording of the Cassadó Cello Concerto I’ve been able to find so it will add some depth to your collection. The album also includes a Konzertstücke and a Cello Concerto by Carl Maria von Weber. The Dance of the Green Devil, for cello and piano, is a light, fun encore piece, something for a cellist show off with at the end of a recital. It’s been popular with cellists ever since it was published. It’s been recorded many times. I find it most interesting to listen to on the 1997 all-Cassadó album by cellist Marco Scano, a former student of Cassadó’s. You hear the music next to many of Cassadó’s other solo cello pieces and get a sense of the composer’s style and expressive range. The liner essay makes much of the idea that as a virtuoso performer, and as a composer and arranger for his instrument, Cassadó was to the cello what Liszt was to the piano. So that leaves the Piano Trio of 1926 — my favorite of these three pieces. This music must have meant a lot to Cassadó. When he’d been 10 years old he’d started performing in a piano trio with his brother Augustin on violin and his father, the church orgainist, pianist, and composer Joaquin Cassadó, on piano. The group performed for nine years until his father’s death in 1915, so you have to think Cassadó would have had those experiences of his youth in mind as he wrote his only piano trio a decade later. The music is less eclectic than the Cello Concerto. It’s got the nationalistic Spanish color that you’d expect, full of exciting themes and tunes, and it’s structurally interesting as well, worth spending 15 minutes with. There’s a first-rate performance by the German ensemble, Trio Kairos, on their album Piano Trios of the 1920’s, which was recorded in 2003 in Hamburg. The album has a great program, with
piano trios by Shostakovich, Martin, Bloch, and Copland. But Cassadó’s is the finale of the program, and it ought to be — it adds an element of fun to the sophistication of the rest of the album.
