Anu Komsi, Vienna Philharmonic & Sakari Oramo - Langgaard: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 6 (2018) [CD-Rip]

• Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) was the major Danish late-Romantic composer who did not gain recognition in his mother country. His greatest successes took place in Germany and Austria, where his Symphonies Nos. 2 and 6 were met with considerable acclaim. Back home, he never received that kind of backing. He died a careworn and despairing individual. On this recording with one of the world's leading orchestras, the tradition-conscious Vienna Philharmonic, one is therefore able to hear Langgaard's music 'return home' to a central European musical culture. At the same time things were going swimmingly for his colleague Jacob Gade (18791963) whose Tango Jalousie has become the absolutely most frequently played piece of Danish music for almost a century.

"These symphonies need no introduction for Records International collectors. This new release is being offered because who would have ever thought, way back when Danacord were doing their Langgaard symphony series with a Bulgarian orchestra, that we’d ever be hearing the frickin’ Vienna Philharmonic playing Rued Langgaard!!!@!# One might say that the retrogade, ultra-conservative pieces he wrote would naturally have fitted a central European orchestra, but this? Wow! Oh, Unnoticed Morning Stars? It’s a movement from his Symphony No. 14 which the composer noted could be played on its own." (Records International)

• The symphonies of Rued Langgaard are not often performed outside his native Denmark, probably because he was tagged as a late Romantic in an era of obligatory modernism. It's true that he wrote tonal music that took a great deal from Richard Strauss in his handling of the orchestra, and from Robert Schumann in its large fields of orchestral arpeggios. It takes an orchestra of the Vienna Philharmonic's caliber to bring these off, so this release, headed by veteran Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo, is welcome. The late Romantic rubric somehow does not give an idea of what Langgaard's music is like: it has a strongly Scandinavian pictorial and programmatic orientation, influenced by other Scandinavian composers but unique in structure and expressive qualities. Consider and sample the middle movement of the Symphony No. 2 ("Vaarbrud," meaning "Awakening of Spring"), which is based on a Danish hymn but is not a set of variations on it, nor a fantasy on it, but rather, you might say, a moderate stretching-out. (Its partial resemblance to Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott heightens the effect.) Langgaard revised his symphonies later in life, shortening several of them; you hear the original versions here, which may be less desirable. But the storm music in the Symphony No. 6 ("Himmelrivende") is of an almost mystical intensity, free-from conventional artifice. Two simpler pieces ring down the curtain: a lyrical movement from a later Langgaard symphony, which is a reasonable choice, and the Tango Jalousie of Jacob Gade, which, although a superb little work, seems to come out of nowhere here. An offbeat, highly worthwhile choice. ~ James Manheim