From his youthful Second and Third symphonies, it is possible to discern only a few of the artistic fingerprints of the mature Danish post-Romantic composer Rued Langgaard. One hears his love of nature, his love of life, and, in his expansive developments and extended climaxes, his love of his own compositional technique. One hears his energy, his ...
While Rued Langgaard never improved as a composer, at least he wrote slightly shorter symphonies, so that counts for something. After nearly an hour of bombastic banalities in his five-movement Symphony No. 1 "Rock Pastorals," Langgaard managed to condense his thought -- if that's not too strong a word for it -- into less than 20 minutes of ...
Much has been made of the mystical bent in Rued Langgaard's piano music, yet listeners will find most of his perfumed pieces only mildly evocative of poetic things, and no more revelatory than the effervescent outpourings of many mid-nineteenth century composers. If aspects of historical antecedents come to mind while hearing the suite inspired by ...
There is, of course, no shortage of Romantic-era violin concertos in the instrument's standard repertoire. None of them found with any regularity on the concert stage, however, hail from Denmark. This DaCapo album demonstrates that there are indeed examples that come to us from the Scandinavian country, and even that some of them are inexplicably ...
The lucidity and luminosity of the opening pages of the Prelude to the opera Antikrist are arguably among the most beautiful in the twentieth century and certainly the best ever composed by the banal, bombastic, and otherwise wholly inconsequential Norwegian composer Rued Langgaard. Indeed, only in the last few pages does Langgaard slip into his ...
Just when you think Langgaard just can't get any worse, he gets worse. How could anything be worse than the bombastic pantheism of his Symphony No. 1 "Rock Pastoral," which he composed when he was 15? Try his Symphony No. 2 "Break of Spring," which he composed when he was 21. After moaning and groaning and going on and on and on for nearly 20 ...
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