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Thursday, November 21, 2019

Alexandre Tansman - Symphonies Vol. 1 (Oleg Caetani)


Information

Composer: Alexandre Tansman
  • (01) Symphony No. 4 in C sharp minor
  • (04) Symphony No. 5 in D major
  • (08) Symphony No. 6 'In Memoriam'

Melbourne Chorale
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Oleg Caetani, conductor

Date: 2006
Label: Chandos
https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%205041

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Review

A much-travelled, but perhaps underpowered, composer

Alexandre Tansman is hard to categorise. Born in Poland in 1897, he moved to France after the First World War and to America just before the Second, returning to France in 1946 and living on until 1986. Such East-West migrations were the lot of many 20th-century composers, of course, but Tansman’s music lacks the strong profile of the composers he is usually compared with. A synthesis of Ravel and Stravinsky might work well in the world of film music – Tansman spent time in California – but it’s a less obvious recipe for success in concert music.

The three works on this disc span the years 1936 to 1944. Comparable fusions between romanticism and neoclassicism can be heard in symphonies by Roussel, Honegger and Martinu, but I don’t find Tansman as distinctive as any of these. Textures are too dense, the thematic material insufficiently characterful to sustain one’s interest consistently, and never more so than when comparisons arise with works like Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments or Symphony in Three Movements. The problem is summed up in the choral finale to the Sixth Symphony, which, as Caroline Rae’s note points out, ‘laments the futility of war’. True, the actual ending is appropriately downbeat, even tentative: but much of the music, harmonically reminiscent of Ravel’s Daphnis, is too soft-centred to register with sufficient power.

There’s no questioning that Oleg Caetani and his Melbourne forces are fervent advocates of Tansman, and the recordings are excellent. For listeners in tune with Tansman’s musical world this could be the beginning of a rewarding series.

-- Arnold Whittall, Gramophone

More reviews:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2018/Sep/Tansman_sys_v1_CHSA5041.htm
https://www.allmusic.com/album/tansman-symphonies-vol-1-mw0001858179
https://www.amazon.com/Tansman-Symphonies-Melbourne-Chorale-Symphony/dp/B00118EI6C

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Alexandre Tansman (12 June 1897 – 15 November 1986) was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of Jewish origin. He spent his early years in his native Poland, but lived in France for most of his life, being granted French citizenship in 1938. His music is often said to be primarily neoclassical, drawing on his Polish Jewish heritage as well as his French musical influences. Tansman wrote more than 300 works, including 7 operas, 11 ballets, 6 oratorios, 80 orchestral pages (with 9 symphonies), and numerous works of chamber and piano music. Almost all his works have been now recorded on CDs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Tansman

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Oleg Caetani (born 1956) is an Italian conductor. He was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, the son of the conductor and composer Igor Markevitch and his second wife Donna Topazia Caetani. Caetani studied with Nadia Boulanger, and also went to the Moscow Conservatory to study conducting with Kirill Kondrashin. He graduated from the St Petersburg Conservatory in conducting with Ilya Musin. Among Caetani's recordings are the first complete cycle of the Shostakovich symphonies recorded by an Italian orchestra, and the symphonic cycles by Tchaikovsky and Gounod (Diapason d'or).

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