Caetani, Melbourne So - Tansman: Symphonies Vol 1 (2006)

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Caetani, Melbourne So - Tansman: Symphonies Vol 1 (2006)

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The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has an outstanding reputation for presenting twentieth-century music and for rediscovering neglected composers something wonderfully demonstrated by this new recording and follows the recently critically applauded recording of Stephan orchestral works.

Polish-born Tansman enjoyed considerable international success during his career as composer, pianist and conductor. He received numerous international honours and was championed by leading conductors and soloists, including Stokowski, Ormandy, and Szigeti. Yet, since Tansman’s death, his music has been largely neglected and is only now beginning to receive renewed attention.

Composer: Alexandre Tansman
Conductor: Oleg Caetani
Orchestra/Ensemble: Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Reviews: Even at the peak of his career, Alexandre Tansman (1897?1986) was generally viewed as a secondary figure. You often saw him described in terms of his similarities to better-known composers (Stravinsky and Ravel in particular), but you rarely saw Tansman trotted out as a point of reference for someone else. And after his death, his music became obscurer still. Why?


In part, he had a low profile because, like many of his contemporary lesser lights, he straddled the lines of his own time?s culture wars. On the one hand, he looked back to certain 19th-century principles that Stravinsky, among other aggressive modernists, had abandoned. In a 1941 interview with the New York Times , for instance, he proclaimed, ?unless the romantic spirit . . . is present, . . . the output is pure intellectualism.? On the other hand, he took up many of the modernists? techniques: certainly, on first hearing any of these three symphonies from what Chandos calls ?The War Years? (1936?1944) you?re more apt to think of Stravinsky than of Rachmaninoff. In the end, both the avant-gardists and the more conservative voices condescended to his music: especially when he returned to Paris after the war?when Boulez and Messiaen were just emerging as major musical forces?he was looked upon as distinctly démodé ; but he was just as likely, during his American years (1941?1946), to be accused of precisely the excessive abstraction he excoriated.


Then, too, his peripatetic life (from Poland to Paris to Los Angeles to Paris) probably didn?t help. Such emigration, of course, was hardly unusual, especially for Jewish composers of the period. Still, being a perpetual visitor undoubtedly undercut his reputation.


But beyond that, I suspect Tansman never achieved the fame of such contemporaries as Stravinsky, Copland, and even Szymanowski because, in fact, his music is not of the first rank. I don?t mean to be dismissive here. There?s plenty of pleasure to be gained from the less-than-great?and placing Tansman with, say, Dohnányi and Kabalevsky rather than Bartók and Shostakovich is hardly to damn him. I?m pleased that new recordings of his music have been flourishing over the past five or six years, and I look forward to the completion of what Chandos promises as a complete run of his nine symphonies. But I can?t say that I was galvanized by this release?and I can?t say that I heard a voice with the kind of individuality you hear, say, even in Martin?.


So what does this music sound like? Despite a few splashes of whimsy (say, the touch of Gershwinesque buoyance in the finale of the Fourth), these symphonies tend to be restless and intent?not surprisingly, given the historical backdrop. Thus, for instance, the Fourth begins with a dark, almost Miaskovskian brooding?and while the colors are often slightly brighter elsewhere, the tension remains in the music?s frequent reliance on tonal ambiguities, motoric rhythms, and a dissonant polyphony that may remind you of Honegger, Bloch (say, the First Concerto grosso), and Bartók (especially the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta ). Yet the tension is generally muted. For all the troubling harmony, for all the underlying resentment, there?s rarely the kind of shattering excess you get, say, in Shostakovich?Tansman is significantly more modest in his expressive aims. It?s typical that, although he ends the Sixth with a choral finale, the singers?at least in this performance?lend color more than grandeur to the occasion. Tansman sometimes falls back on rather corny gestures, too (the bugle calls at the end of the Sixth are especially disappointing); and even though the symphonies here, especially the 20-minute Sixth, are fairly compact, there?s a fair amount of note-spinning. Even Martin Anderson, who enjoys Tansman more than I do, admits that in the first movement of the Fourth, ?he takes longer than necessary to make his structural point? (24:4). (For other assessments of Tansman?s output that are more positive than mine, you?re encouraged to check out further commentary by Anderson in 23:6 and by Paul Snook in 16:4, 20:2, and 25:1.)


As for the performances: I usually find Caetani?s conducting diffuse?and that?s certainly the case here. Surely, this music could benefit from more propulsion, more edge. The engineering is slightly unfocused, too, with little information in the rear surround-sound channels and little sense of acoustic space. Still, it?s churlish to complain, especially when no competition for any of these works seems to be readily available at the moment. Recommended for those who want to venture beyond the familiar.