Langgaard - Piano Works

There are composers whose fame rests as much with their peculiarities as with their music. One thinks of Sorabji, Alkan, Gurdjieff and others. Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) belongs in this group. He lived an essentially isolated life, living with his mother until her death in 1926 and then marrying her housekeeper. He never had much of a job until he finally became organist at a provincial Danish church where he remained until his death. He was shunned in Ribe, the provincial town in which he lived, and tended to sleep during the day, wander the streets at night. He composed voluminously and with few exceptions these works had few or even no performances. He was ignored even by the Danes, much less the world at large, until a minor reexamination of his works began in the past twenty years or so. I will admit that the only music of his that I knew was his 'Sfaerernes musik' ('Music of the Spheres'), a rambling and sometimes effective orchestral piece loaded with symbolist and religious subtext.

This disc presents several of his piano works, and indeed four of the five works purport to be receiving their first-ever recordings. 'Gitanjali-Hymner' ('Gitanjali Hymns') is a thirty-minute collection of 10 pieces, each inspired by a particular passage in Rabindranath Tagore's poetry (and those poems are reproduced in the very nicely done CD booklet). The musical language is rather like Grieg hybridized with Rachmaninoff, but the form of most of the pieces is somewhat rambling and even improvisatory. At times, frankly, it sounds like notated noodling. It is all very tuneful, not very harmonically adventuresome and at times banal. The booklet writer (Esben Tange, who I guess to be the pianists's husband) makes much of No. 8, 'Tavshedens Hav' ('The Sea of Silence'), primarily commenting about its illustration of this sentence of Tagore's: 'Let all my songs gather together their diverse strains into a single current and flow to a sea of silence.' But to my ears this is almost New Age strumming of the simplest sort.

'Fantasi-Sonate' ('Fantasy Sonata') from 1916 is a bit more interesting, and what is even more interesting is that Langgaard essentially rewrote it, shortening it drastically, in 1948, as the first movement of a new work, 'Vanvidsfantasi' ('Insanity Fantasy') that is, for me, the most compelling of the longer works on this disc. A three-movement work, 'Vanvidsfantasi,' is marked by long passages with the sustaining pedal held down, causing a kind of blurry sonic scrim through which the alternately dream-like and dramatic music emerges. The third movement is particularly dramatic and effective. It is of note that Langgaard may indeed have been suffering from a psychosis in the period surrounding the composition of this work, and Esben Tange reminds us that throughout his life Langgaard identified with the personal history of Robert Schumann (whose music his sometimes echoes) and particularly with Schumann's last years in which he was confined in a hospital for the mentally ill.

There is a very short innocuous Schumannesque work 'Nat Paa Sundet' ('Night on the Sound') written when Langgaard was thirteen. It is followed by the equally short 'Hél-Sfaerernes Musik' ('Hél-Sphere Music'; 'Hél' is cognate with our word 'Hell') which could not be more different from the dreamy 'Nat Paa Sundet'. It is bleak, dramatic, dissonant, fragmented and disturbing, and easily the most original music on the disc. One wishes one could hear more of Langgaard's music in this vein.

The pianist here is Berit Johansen Tange, a fine musician whose technical abilities are more than a match for this music's requirements. I suspect she gives this music as good an outing as it is likely to get any time soon. It's a shame there isn't much here to return to.

TT=67mins

Scott Morrison