Rued Langgaard was a loon, but a compelling loon. His Fourteenth Symphony has fanciful titles like “Radio-Caruso and forced energy” and “Dads’ rush to the office”, but the music is retro-Romantic, with just enough off-kilter sounds to make you question whether his is affection homage or straight caricature. Symphony No. 13, “Belief in Wonders”, is simply a half hour of lovely music, tuneful and tinged with nostalgia. Its predecessor, Hélsingborg, with the emphasis on the “Hell”, dates from a time when the composer despaired of, well, everything. It lasts a mere seven nihilistic minutes, but somehow manages to be fun all the same. Langgaard no doubt would have objected to that description, but then crazy people are sometimes unwittingly entertaining.
In short, if you’ve been collecting this excellent series then you need this disc. The performances are uniformly outstanding, beautifully played, and excitingly conducted by Thomas Dausgaard, and the sonics are terrific. Langgaard spent his entire career in opposition to something–secularism, modern life, the neo-classicism of Carl Nielsen, his much-loathed wife–but he somehow manages never to sound merely bitter. However miserable his life was (and much of it was his own doing), his love of music for its own sake shines through all of these quirky but very approachable symphonies. Certainly their dates of composition (the mid to late 1940s) cast a fascinating light on Denmark’s highly diverse range of compositional work in the mid 20th century. [5/24/2007]
