Orchestral Music

Album review

Once you think the resources of the early twentieth century avant-garde have finally been exhausted, then someone else pulls up the corner of a page of forgotten music and delivers yet another historical salvo. In this case, it is music belonging to the brother of a sister whose work we already know; namely Grazyna Bacewicz, the fiercely independent Polish violinist and composer who refused to tow the serial line, and created highly individual neo-Classical compositions into the 1960s. Bacewicz was born into a Polish-Lithuanian family, but made her career in Poland; her brother Vytautas Bacevicius is generally considered a Lithuanian composer, but made his career -- if you can call it that -- in the United States. Bacevicius was concerned with "cosmic music," though not that of outer, but inner space, the cosmos as contained within the spiritual dimension of a person. Bacevicius was an intensely complex person whose impoverished life was spent in obscurity and wholly devoted to his music, the vast majority of which was never heard during his lifetime. Resembling to some degree the towering machines built by Edgard Varèse in his Arcana and those of Arthur Honegger in Pacific 231, the orchestral music of Bacevicius is heard for the first time in Toccata Classics' powerful and revelatory Bacevicius: Orchestral Music. Bacevicius seemed to favor rather short works, and this disc includes two symphonic poems, two symphonies, and piano concerto performed with a sense of passion and purpose by the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra under conductors Vytautas Lukocius and Martynas Staskus. The Poème électrique (1932) reaches out and grabs the listener from the collar from the very beginning; like the much later music of jazz composer Robert Graettinger, it is big, fierce, and propulsively rhythmic. The Piano Concerto No. 1 Sur les themes lituaniens is a child of the 1920s, and although traces of folk forms are vaguely detectable here and there, Bacevicius is determined not to make it an easy ride for the listener -- it is rich with a variety of striking colors and wide-ranging dynamics. His "war symphony," No. 2 (1940), was written by Bacevicius in what he called his "style of compromise" in the hope of attracting performances, and it was submitted to the attention of Leopold Stokowski, who did not take it up. It's really not much of a compromise -- the music is still as tough, but not as dense, as his earlier works. All compromise is abandoned in the Symphony Cosmique (1960) and in the remarkable Graphique (1964), a symphonic poem based on a graphic sketch that -- one would have thought -- would have proved popular in the glory days of composers like Xenakis. However, this was not to be, as it was never performed in Bacevicius' lifetime. For those interested in the byways of twentieth century who enjoy music that challenges, but never bores, Toccata Classics' Bacevicius: Orchestral Music should be first priority. It is quite difficult to describe the music well in a few words; superficially it may sound like Varèse or Mosolov, but it has clarity of orchestral thinking more like Honegger. Yet Bacevicius' musical style is its own brand; while he assimilated some of the models that all of these composers shared, such as Scriabin, he really doesn't sound like them, either. Bacevicius: Orchestral Music will knock the socks off listeners who enjoy meaty contemporary music that is neither tame nor too cold and formally arch -- too bad Frank Zappa didn't live to hear this composer.
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