In Thursday’s (8/5) Daily Telegraph (London), Ivan Hewett writes, “A hundred years ago, as the Machine Age was getting under way … many composers retreated into a dream. They wrote vast cloudy orchestral tableaux in which allegorical figures glimmered, as in some gold-encrusted Symbolist frieze. … Perhaps the strangest of all these musical visions is Rued Langgaard’s Music of the Spheres, which is about to receive its British premiere at the Proms. It is described in the preface to the score as a ‘celestial and earthly music from red glowing strings, on which life plays with claws of a beast of prey—life, with a crown of iris on its marble face and the stereotypical—yet living—demonic smile on its lily-white cheeks…’ … But by the time [Langgaard] died in 1952 he’d been more or less forgotten … a rare performance of a symphony in the 1970s caught the attention of conductor Thomas Dausgaard, who was then a high-school student. … That early fascination has borne fruit. Dausgaard has just finished a complete recording of all Langaard’s symphonies with his own Danish National Symphony Orchestra, and he’ll be leading the orchestra in the Proms premiere of Music of the Spheres.”
Posted August 5, 2010
