The mystical poetry
of Rabindranath Tagore who was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913,
attracted many composers including Frank
Bridge, John Alden Carpenter, Zemlinsky,
Bernard Stevens, Stenhammar, Edvin Kallstenius,
Arthur Meulemans and more recently Alistair
Hinton. Most of them set the poetry
for voice. The Danish composer Langgaard
explores the essence of the poetry through
a ten movement suite. Much of this is
intensely romantic in a muscular Brahmsian
way. However Den fjerne Sang,
Tavshedens Hav and Himmel-Ensomhed
are made of gentler reflective stuff
and Sommerhvisken and Den
hvileløse Vind dances and
bubbles lightly. This feathery lyricism
ascends close to Grieg in the impressive
Gyldne Strømme.
The 1916 Fantasi-Sonate,
in a single twenty minute movement,
has a liquid serenity and the manner
and some of the mannerisms of Schumann.
The earliest piece here is Nat paa
Sundet. This brevity has a tremulous,
cloud-hung occlusion of mood suggesting
that the composer might have heard some
Rachmaninov. For Hél-Sfærernes
Musik comes a violent change of
idiom. This momentary mood piece is
violent and dysjunctive - an electric
storm of a piece - completely at odds
with everything else here. You expect
the three movement Vanvidsfantasi,
from only one year later, to be
more of the same but in fact it returns
to the grand and tear-stained Brahms-Schumann
manner of the 1900s and 1910s. If this
music is to have any chance it is better
to forget when it was written and sit
back and absorb it as an obsessive romantic
era discovery. Its anachronistic quality
hardly matters when the focus is on
music that was Langgaard’s exploration
of Schumann’s dark and tortured state
of mind during the years preceding his
death in Bonn in 1856. Langgaard however
insists that the listener peers out
on contemporary despair in momentary
vignettes or flashes of discord in the
finale. Disorientation lends intensity
to the listening experience.
Langgaard’s symphonies
- especially the teens in the series
- can be extraordinary vehicles for
a startling re-adoption of the Schumann
idiom. The piano music follows a similar
pattern. It is in such works as Hél-Sfærernes
Musik, the opera Anti-Christ
and the choral-orchestral Music
of the Spheres that Langgaard looks
to another polarity altogether from
the accustomed grand manner romantic-heroism.
This CD, most lucidly
and thoroughly annotated by the sympathetic
and commandingly authoritative pianist,
presents Langgaard to the world as a
tortured soul whose delight in melody
was equalled only by his despair over
contemporary neglect.
Rob Barnett
RUED LANGGAARD WEBSITE
www.langgaard.dk
Berit Johansen Tange (piano) 
