Holmboe: Four Symphonic Metamorphoses

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

 

 

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Why buy this record?
Holmboe is billed as the most important Danish symphonist since Nielsen which seems a less than wholeheated endorsement (no offence to Nielsen or Danish composers - but why not place him within the international symphonic output of the 20th Century?). And the conductor also is relatively unknown on record except for his advocacy of Holmboe (where he gets praised highly by professional critics - the Penguin Guide gives this record a rosette, no less - as well as Amazon critics: but how do I know that these people are not merely anoraks who praise something for it's obscurity rather than it's true greatness?).

What to make of this music?
Superficially, it is accessibly tonal. But beyond that I have listened again and again and must say I find the music difficult ... or is it that there is just not that much there? There is a very superficial resemblance to Shostakovich but, while Shostakovich communicates powerfully and compellingly, this music somehow doesn't come together in my head as a coherent and powerful whole. The difficulty of this music is more akin to the difficulty I have with late Tippett. But I know now that Tippett will reward me in the end (and I know the limits of the reward he delivers).

Also, if there is a fault with this music, is it really with the music or the performances? How am I to know? After all even Beethoven and Brahms can fail to catch fire in the wrong hands.

And yet .... and yet ....
The fact that I have returned again and again to this record says something ... the fact that I enjoy these pieces most times I listen to them also says something. Perhaps my failure to register the pieces as powerfully coherent wholes - more than the mere sum of their attractive and impressive parts - is my failure? I'm not as young as I was and have less ability to absorb the totally new.

Intrigued?
Then give this record a go. And share your views, too. I certainly do not regret buying this record and it has certainly given me hours of stimulating listening. So, the journey has been good even if I'm not sure I have arrived anywhere that interesting.

PS (July 2011) - A year has passed and still I return to these pieces with pleasure. I have spent the year listening to a lot more recent music than I had been previously. I have discovered a love for Lutoslawski, for example, and Ligeti and Elliott Carter - music that is far more radical or "difficult" than Holmboe is - as well as much music from Baltic and ex-Soviet states - some of which is both provocatively new and simple. Holmboe fits somehow within this wider experience and I can see more clearly now that these works are both memorable and impressive. So my five stars are no longer tentative, I guess. But with very new music we are somewhat adrift - history tells us that we are likely to reject the great and choose the mediocre.

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