The Cosmic Visions of Vytautas Bacevičius

While I'll admit that I don't follow truly contemporary music as much as I should, I have been to an awful lot of concerts primarily composed of works written by my generation or slightly older, the proverbial Hope For Our Future.  While that music was many things, I can sum up 90% of it in two words: emotionally empty.  I don't know exactly what's going wrong in composition education (at least in this country), but the majority of new music I've heard from college students has a certain amount of technical polish and a professional attitude but either lacks heart or lacks the ability to communicate heart through music.  My theory is that, as more and more people are going to college and signing up for arts tracks, a higher percentage ordinary people are put into positions where they are forced to produce works that express their unique, honest voice - and that's the very thing most college-aged arts students don't express.  A big culprit is composition education's relationship to classical commercialism, and one can see the pressures facing a fledgling composer to go either commercially viable or most definitely non-commercial, with these ideas being recognizable, mutually exclusive spheres.  Classical music is often marketed on its supposed accessibility and emotional impact, and many of the biggest names in classical music today write largely tonal, crowd-pleasing programmers (such as two of the most popular contemporary orchestral works today, John Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine and Jennifer Higdon's blue cathedral), and so impressionable young people see emotional communication as part of the "commercial" M.O. and think that "serious" music can't have any of it.  Not helping this is the fact that many people see "emotion" in music as "sentimentality", but it's best not to get bogged down by semantics.  Education is controlled by its desire to be standardized and provable, and as such composition teachers focus on composers whose works have clear organizational principles, teaching students that they will have to explain their work in plain English (especially for thesis committees), and therefore their work needs to adhere to strict principles of their own design.  Crafting original technical parameters as well as effective emotional statements is quite difficult, and so the second big culprit is the inability of young composers to realize emotional effectiveness in the grinding work of codified composition.  It may also be as simple as a glut of ordinary people training in the arts producing a higher percentage of artists who have nothing to say, but that accusation is depressing and unhelpful (though not necessarily false).  Shouldn't artistic youth be a celebration of creative abandon?  Isn't that why we love Petrushka as much as we do?

A small solution to this would be to start teaching a new classification of composers, an elusive and brilliant class I'd like to call Pantonal Visionaries.  These composers are defined by their use of every radical modernist technique they can come up with in an effort to create transcendent emotional experiences through music, writing from enormous interior worlds and shunning normalcy.  These figures have an obvious appeal to younger artists as their work is less focused on provable economics and more on ingenious howling at the moon. The father of all of them could be said to be Gustav Mahler, whose 10 massive symphonies touched upon universal themes of man's place in the cosmos and attempted to encapsulate all of life through music.  There's a whole line (kinda) of Americans beginning with Charles Ives, who embraced classical and colloquial musics, tonality and atonality, pleasant music and noise in a Whitmanian celebration of total artistic expression.  The next in line after him would be Carl Ruggles, whose scant few works are equal in drama to the War in Heaven and were carved out by his utterly unique, trial-and-error system of atonal counterpoint.  Two acutely obscure descendants are George Flynn and Nicholas Thorne, both of whom will be coming to this blog and the latter of which is one of my favorite composers of all time.  Two other sui generis figures qualify, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji and Dane Rudhyar, both of whom are blessed loons and whose musics couldn't be farther apart in techniques and inspirations.  I'd also be kicking myself if I didn't include Abel Decaux, whose sole composition took Impressionism to staggering new possibilities in the name of poetic horror.  And lastly, there's the great post-Chopin mystic Alexander Scriabin, who began in that wonderfully Russian tradition of piano miniatures much in the style of his contemporaries and ended far away from tonality, seeking a far-off star of private theosophy.

I've left Scriabin for last because he was a primary member of a "tradition" of which today's subject, the Lithuanian composer-pianist Vytautas Bacevičius, felt he was a descendant.  The other figures included the dreadfully underperformed André Jolivet and the beguiling ultra-modernist Edgard Varèse, and those three figures crafted masterful works enormous in their conception and dense in color and technical innovation.  Bacevičius stands apart from these men not only by his unique artistic voice but also his tragic obscurity, an issue that is slowly being resolved only very, very recently, largely due to the efforts of Lithuanian pianist Gabrielus Alekna.  It has been a while since we visited the Baltic states, the last time being many months ago when I talked about the Latvian composer Volfgangs Dārziņš, and while Lithuania is no stranger to artistic visionaries (like the fine composer and brilliant painter Mikolajus Čiurlionis)  Bacevičius is easily the most original and fascinating composer I've ever heard from its shores.

Bacevičius (1905-1970) was born in the Polish city of Łódź to a Lithuanian-Polish family, one whose children were taught not only music but also to celebrate both of their heritages.  Some may recognize the name of Grażyna Bacewicz, and that's because she's Vytautas's sister; he moved to Lithuania in the 20's and adopted the Lithuanian form of his name as his identity matured.   Grażyna's music is Neo-Classical, and the complete disparity of their music is not only a testament to their distinct imaginations but also to the quality of their upbringing.  After studying with Nikolai Tcherepnin (father of Alexander and grandfather of Ivan) in Paris he returned to Lithuania and had great success as a pianist as well as a composer, becoming the Lithuanian Chair of the International Society for Contemporary Music.  However, while touring in Argentina, the Nazis invaded Poland and Lithuania, cutting him off from his family and nation.  He settled in New York in 1940 and would remain there until his death, never again stepping foot in Lithuania or Poland, and his cultural and ideological isolation is most likely the prime suspect in his obscurity.  He maintained a career as a pianist and teacher, performing many of his own works, and his self-concertizing led to the publication of a number of his piano works, mostly in the late 60's by Mercury Music Corporation.  Though now defunct, Mercury was a major player in the 40's and 50's with plenty of highly regarded composers in their roster, but while their engravings of his works are excellent the covers do nothing for him, a clear indicator that they had no idea how to promote his work.  Just look at this:

Now that's just sad.  There's something deeply irritating about how small the title is, and I've seen that font used in replacement title cards for 50's monster movie trailers.  All of the Mercury editions look like this, jaw-droppingly boring introductions to wild, cathartic music, and I'm saying this as a guy with no qualms about template covers as long as they're eye-catching and classy; this template just happenes makes me think I'm about to read the bio-bibliography of an economist.  The funny thing is that the same problem affected the few scores of his published in the mid-40's by the much smaller publisher Paragon Music, as if Bacevičius actually liked the template (though with the Paragon scores you can at least read the title from more than a foot away):

If it seems like I'm harping on minutiae I apologize, but if you listened to that first track it should be apparent that Bacevičius's music is so much more creative and emotionally powerful than anything you could imagine looking at those covers.  His early works are steeped in the vaulting pantonality of late Scriabin, though Bacevičius was quick to craft his own language, harmonically and rhythmically rich and able to instinctually turn on a dime.  While he employed familiar structural phrasing in these early works he able to pack in moments of astonishing invention to break the pattern, and as his assurance in his own voice matured his lyrical instincts would progress beyond traditional phrasing and into his "cosmic" phase (but we'll get to that a bit later).  His harmonic language was certainly reminiscent of tonal chord structures and scale patterns, but his diversions from these elements lead to some of the most elaborate, refined and haunting post-tonal sonorities I've ever heard.

The pieces I've featured here are part of his seven-strong series of Mots (French for "words"), six of which are for piano (the last for two pianos) and the second for organ, and they are some of his most accomplished and representative works.  The quicksilver approach to phrasing, emotion and dramatics requires an especially sensitive and virtuosic performer to bring the pieces to life, and Alekna fits the bill with talent to spare.  The fact that Bacevičius performed these himself gives you some idea of his skills as a pianist, and hopefully more pianists can take on the gorgeous challenges these works present, though It's a shame the American scores are all way out of print.  He also wrote many orchestral works, including six symphonies and a number of concertos and genreless works, and he considered them to be superior to his piano music.  The last of the symphonies, "Cosmic" (maddeningly absent from YouTube), is one of the great works of the last phase of his career in which he strove for an artistic ideal of "cosmic" music.  For Bacevičius, "cosmic" didn't refer to outer space but rather the human interior world, and he believed the next step for atonality was to capture the infinite complexity and beauty of this horizonless interior space, the full realization of his Pantonal Visionary status.  He encapsulates this sentiment exquisitely in his praise of Varèse's electro-acoustic work Déserts, where he describes "this distant inner space which no telescope can reach, where man is alone in a world of mystery and essential solitude."  There is a Poème Cosmique for piano from this time which is wonderful, but for my money the closest he gets to this ideal in his piano works is the Sixième Mot.

Discarding both time signatures and bar lines, the Mot's musical ideas erupt organically, almost improvisatory in its instinctual freedom but showing a complete mastery of Bacevičiusian harmony.  He swings between horripilative resonance and terse pointillism, terror and introspection and everything in between with a breathless sense of discovery and charisma.  Each new idea is trumped by the next, allowing not a single moment of tedium or complacency to slip in, making performing it a minor spiritual experience as the pianist draws the listener into a mysterious and harrowing subconscious plane.  It's one of the most startlingly brilliant piano works published at the time and should be sought out as fast as you can (or as fast as I can scan the scores of his that I've got).

There's always one more out there.  Just when you think you can't find any more undiscovered geniuses guys like Bacevičius get tilled from the barren Earth like forgotten potatoes.  His work is a kind of music I can only dream of, as emotionally cathartic as it is technically adventurous, as careful to detail as it is barreling through new worlds only understood by itself.  It opens the door to the horizons that no telescope can reach, so make the plunge and never look back.

~PNK

Alexei Stanchinsky's Euphonious Fractals

The music world is littered with many untimely deaths, so much so that it's business as usual in Rock stardom, and without fail people keep a special place in their hearts for the Might Have Beens.  Monroe Couper was a recent example, but there are many more and today's may be my personal favorite (if that's the most sensitive wording).  Hailed in his lifetime as a genius by his elders, Alexei Stanchinsky (1888-1914) had always been troubled, having been diagnosed with the symptom-stuffed dementia praecox and reeling from the death of his father.  At the age of 26, just months after a career-making recital of his mature work, Stanchinsky was found dead next to a country stream, and to this day no one is sure if it was illness or suicide, but all new that Russian music had lost one if its best and brightest.  I first discovered him through one of my favorite piano albums, Thomas Adès - Piano, and his best pieces are some of the most haunting and innovative works in the whole of the piano repertoire.  The pieces on Ades's album are part of the reason I started looking for obscure works, and they remain gorgeous reminders of music's capacity to create religious experiences.

Trained among the already rich and intricate language of Russia's turn-of-the-century elite, Stanchinsky soon found his own sophisticated and heartbreaking voice.  Readers of this blog may remember the "Scriabinism" tag I've attached to a couple of articles, though I'll be the first to admit its vagueness as a label.  Alexander Scriabin's piano music came flying out the starting gate with some wildly influential attributes, such as deft rhythmic complexity, a rich extended tonality and refined, lattice-like arpeggiated melodies.  For example, here's the first line to the first of his 24 Preludes, op. 11:

All of these elements are exploited in the Prelude in the Lydian Mode, one of Stanchinsky's most beautiful early works, at times to startling new extents, such as the rare 21/16 time signature (three groups of seven notes each).  The left hand ostinato makes a rich tapestry upon which the melody tiptoes, as well as being a sweeping, cello-like melody in itself.  I've always thought that you can create the impression of expansive or constricted time by simply bumping all the note lengths up or down a level respectively, and in Stanchinsky's slow works such as the Prelude he note values are zoomed in to a near microscopic level, as if euphonious fractals exist just below humanity's musical comprehension.  The already intoxicating rhythmic web is divided in a seemingly endless variety of pulse, fashioning in the process new melodies so poignant as to arch the back in ecstasy.  Counterpoint has been deeply important to Russian classical music since the Mighty Handful, with an unbroken line stretching from Taneyev to Shostakovich, but I never saw a composer reach the same dazzling heights of mastery and innovation as Stanchinsky.  The Prelude is just a taste, and soon enough he showed his contrapuntal power with the Four Canon-Preludes, the third of which is especially incredible.

The listening experience is like stargazing, drinking deep of the silent diamond expanse of the universe.  It takes extraordinary sensitivity of balance and pedal to play these works, and both recordings of this work are excellent.  They also require stellar vision*, as looking at the scores of some of his works is like looking at wood grain through an electron microscope.

His last works, by the time he started assigning opus numbers, are so accomplished they make his death seem an unthinkable robbery.  While many people point to his 12 Sketches, op. 1 as his greatest technical display, I think that while their variety and innovation make them important entries in Russian piano music his greatest work is his Piano Sonata no. 2 in G major, and it has become one of my favorite piano works of all time.  Divided in two movements rather than the usual three or four (even one movement is more common), the latter is his best fast movement, cast in 11/8 and containing passages and sonorities so unbelievable I'd sacrifice a dozen newborns to have written them myself.  Essentially a dance, the Presto swings between charismatic darkness and atmospheric delicacy.  Every possible rhythmic subtlety and melodic contour is exploited, a harrowing kaleidoscope of motives and passions.  While Scriabin's most virtuosic sonatas may eclipse it in technical display, Stanchinsky's reliance on singable melodies and recognizable modes gives the audience the anchors necessary to comprehend his genius without deep analysis.  That doesn't mean that it's easy to play, and only a couple of pianists have tackled it; Nikolay Fefilov's recording has both the technical mastery and interpretive confidence to make the movement sing.

Just because I put the second movement first doesn't mean I forgot the first, and it may be the greatest fugue I've ever seen**.  Stanchinsky's subjects and counter-subjects are his best ever in this movement, using wide leaps without losing the listener's ability to follow the tune.  The tempo is once again achingly slow, but the rhythmic divisions become so thin as to eschew fears of monotony; some of his textures are immensely fragile in their static refinement, like crystal spiderwebs.  The key follows a unique path, beginning in G major and snaking down into atonality, the piano's lowest registers creating a feeling of arcane foreboding.  When the home key returns the right hand explodes into constellations of fractalling arpeggios, and the piece eventually settles into a sophisticated, almost jazzy alternative to V-I (which I won't dare spoil).

Only a scant handful of pianists have recorded Stanchinsky's works, and his audience is far too small for the accessibility of these works.  I'm of the opinion that it's better to bring an audience to esoteric art with a few good anchors for them to hold onto, and Stanchinsky picked the right ones to draw the listener into his crystalline soundworld.  He'll continue to remain obscure unless he gains more high profile performers, and his oeuvre is the kind that could attract someone like Marc-Andre Hamélin, arguably the world's greatest living pianist and a champion of piano works of this period and character.  All of Stanchinsky's works have fallen into the public domain, and all his piano music can be gotten here.  This article has been a long time coming, with the opportunity to share some of my favorite pieces being a driving element in my unjustly ignored scholarly subjects***.  Perhaps its not very rigorous of me to highlight a composer with such strong sentimental value, but this is the season of memory and you couldn't pick a better piece of nostalgia if you raided the Library of Congress.  Here's to you , Alexei, and let your legend grow as much as it can - I'll help out as much as I can.

~PNK

*Heh, stargazing puns.

**Apologies to Bach fans, of course.

***Though I'd be the first to call my work more Pop Scholarship than anything else.  I have no shame in that, thank you very much.

Visual Music - Trains by Roy Agnew

In my article on Roy Agnew I was forced by YouTube's wheel of fate to showcase the slower side of Agnew's oeuvre, and so I was delighted to discover that one of Agnew's most driving pieces has one of his best covers:

There weren't (and arguably still aren't) many sheet music firms in Australia in the '20's, as the majority of music for sale was by British and continental European composers, so seeing an exotically marketed machine-age curtain-raiser by a local boy must have knocked off socks from Sydney to Perth.  As you can guess from the snippet above, Trains is a futurist vehicle portrait much in the spirit of the many '20's "airplane" pieces, including works George Antheil, Leo Ornstein and Emerson Whithorne (even though trains predate cars and planes by several decades).  While the piece itself looks perpetuum mobile enough with plenty of pan-tonality to go around, its cover is what makes it distinctive, as it's about as far away from futurism as you can get without tripping into previous centuries.  Made with thick-brushed watercolors, the train looks like a toy, and if it were to follow that track at full speed it'd fly off the rails.  The title presentation is overwhelmingly bold for the engine below (with the bottom of the T's trunk forming the point of a rail spike), creating a child-like sense of mis-proportioned design and the feel of a sketch tucked into the corner of the page of a larger art notebook, waiting to be brought to life.  There's a part of me that wants to attribute this childishness to a youthful sense of wonder at the sight of a train, an idea only vaguely supported by the piece's frightening tone, but the other part thinks that's giving the art department a little too much credit.  The publisher may have felt the cover didn't properly illustrate the modernism the piece itself mustered, so the inner title page take a turn for the sparse:

While this artwork is a far cry from the piece's menace it certainly brings the deco to the table.  Horsehair brushes are swapped for ultra-fine fountain pens, displaying such a pristine touch and eye for space as to evoke the comics of Winsor McCay (Little Nemo, Gertie the Dinosaur).  It's remarkable how much of the physical presence of a train the artist achieves with a single line.  The lettering is the height of sophisticated restraint, as elegant and spare as a Basie solo.  I especially enjoy the word "by", usually an afterthought or ornament but here an alluring typographical island unto itself.  I can't help but admit that both these covers fail to advertise the mood of the music, but I don't really care - each one stands as a minor gem of inter-war design, and in some ways more rewarding than the music itself.  Lord knows the piano rep didn't need another endless parade of 16th notes passed off as excitement, despite their author's considerable talent.  Also, I'd be in remiss if I didn't feature the seal of Trains's publishing firm, W. Paxton & Co., because monograms are always worth your time.

~PNK

Roy Agnew - Diffuse Refractions of the Southern Star

Australia had a long road to being taken seriously as a global presence, or even as a Western presence, and its arts scene, while now thriving, spent the first half of the 20th century in limbo.  While many people in the US know about the boom in the Australian film industry in the 1970's (Walkabout, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Cars that Ate Paris), Australia's compositional scene is still a non-entity for most of the world, aside from John Antill's Rite of Spring-esque, now-pseudo-racist ballet Corroboree.  The only Australian composers of the past 30 years to gain any kind of international recognition are Peter Sculthorpe and Carl Vine, both of whom have made a habit of playing the populist card.  The most famous Australian-born composer is Percy Grainger, though he left the country at age 13 and spent his most important years in England and America (that hasn't stopped any Australian fans, though).  It's perhaps fitting that the other important Australian composer from the first half of the last century, Roy Agnew (1891-1944) shares some technical similarities with Grainger, though not his heart or themes.

Trained in piano by a handful of Sydney-based musical sub-names (as well as a brief stint under Alfred HIll), Agnew sidestepped the stereotype of cloying conservatism that so many English-speaking countries cultivated in music throughout the 1910's.  His Australian Forest Pieces of 1913 brought his vernacular into the impressionistic fold, and he was very successful performing his own works throughout the next few decades.  In the 20's he studied with Gerrard Williams and Cyril Scott, the latter of which was once a household-name famous impressionist-mystic best known for the Avant-Salon classic Lotus Land.  Scott has been named among possible influences on Agnew's work, but one man who may have had more influence than any other was the meteorically influential Alexander Scriabin, another self-made impressionist by way of mysticism and a candidate for an alternative founder of 20th century music if the big four (Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Bartok) hadn't pummeled his name from the history books.  His mature works of the 20's and later traverse harmonic landscapes few other people did, not so much in density of dissonance but rather his very personal choice of sonority and movement, making him an Australian counterpart to Arnold Bax.  Agnew's works lean towards aching poignance and reverie, a sentiment periodically shared by Grainger but always framed by Anglo folk influences and a predilection for overt climax.  His mature language is best encapsulated in his 1922 miniature Poem no. 1, of which the only YouTube version is performed by me (albeit a tad slow); oddly enough I'm the one who's made the most effort to record his work on the web.

It's odd how very few modern pianists have recorded his works; they're just ripe for the picking and would go over quite well with today's audiences.  There are a few all-Agnew albums in existence, but they're all confined to Australian labels with no American exposure.  Impressionism has never had much of a problem making money, after all, and not all of his work is langourous.  Listeners without the time on their hands for extensive searching will find that almost all the easily accessible performances, all on YouTube, are by amateurs, sometimes with glaring errors, but one of his big works did find its way to our thrifty doorstep:

The Sonata Ballade most shows the influence of Scriabin, with vaulting post-Romantic sturm und drang flowing into elliptical harmonic swirls.  As in vogue as these kinds of piano sonata were among early Soviet composers (until the arts inquisitions put a stop to dissonance and any music of interest), the rest of the music world had taken a turn for the Neo-Classical, which left no room for dark sincerity such as Agnew's.  The piece won an award in the Musical Association of New South Wales' Sesqui-Centenary Competition for Australian Composers, but I can't imagine it would fit in well with the musical environment of the eve of WWII.  It's oddly fitting as a war piece, as the synthesis of Straussian heroic motives and fraught pan-tonality make for a grand portrait of misplaced nationalism and the horror of clashing jingoism.  Though Agnew died having achieved real success and made his country proud, the memory of his work entered into steep decline in the latter half of the century and it hasn't been heard too much since.  Academia and the entertainment machine favored clarity over mystery, and so the rich, personal atonalists such as Agnew, Scott, Scriabin and Dane Rudhyar were the first casualties of the New Provable Order.  I'm certain a revival is inevitable, as Agnew's oeuvre is a lush and marketable one, and it's not like Australia's pianists have completely dropped the ball.  If only we could get a hold of those albums, then maybe we'd have more incentive to make his music our own.  Many of his scores have been uploaded to IMSLP, which is where I got the ones I play here, so have at 'em and thank the stars that the internet exists.  Hopefully my efforts, including two more articles on Agnew for Forgotten Leaves and Visual music as well as the recording below, help out a bit, but the loveliness of his works are self-evident and may be the source of their own gravy.  In any case, here's to the mystery of extended tonality and humanity's need for the dark and quiet.

~PNK

How's Georgy Catoire for an inaugural post?

Whenever I hear a piece of art deemed a "classic" there is a part of me that cringes.  It isn't merely that I may not like the work in particular, but the notion that this work must last beyond others, and that those others aren't worth the consumer's time.  In all my time reading books, watching movies, and listening to music I can't think of anything more counterproductive to personal growth than sticking to the standards, as so many great artists and their works are left behind by history for any number of reasons, be it artistic politics, real politics, the blockheadedness of the public or just bad luck.  It's been a major obsession of mine for the past few years to find great lost composers and works and work my hardest to restore them to their rightful places in the classical canon (or at least get a few more recordings and performances).  And I can't think of a better entryway to obscure composers than Georgy Catoire (1861-1926).

Catoire (of both Russian and French lineage) is an interesting case in Russian music, a composer who was right in line with a compositional lineage (the piano school headed by the work of Scriabin) and then was forgotten by his peers for being irrelevant at the end of his career.  What I mean by all that is that his work fit in with the vogue for a good while, and then two radical changes left him in the dust: the ultra-modern early Soviet school under Lenin, and the repressive populist regime under Stalin.  The funny thing about him being left in the dust is that some composers thrived under Stalin by being crushingly old-fashioned; Catoire had the misfortune in having little interest in Russian National themes.  It would be safe to say that between his twin influences of Scriabin and Wagner (him actually being one of the few Russians in the Wagner society), his had much more interesting things on his mind.

Though he wrote music in many genres (including the orchestra and many chamber pieces) it appears Catoire will mostly be remembered for his piano works, and I can't see anything wrong with that on account of them being pretty fantastic.  The above piece is wickedly effective, and has a beautiful fetish with the Dorian mode and half-diminished chords.  As difficult as it sounds it actually lays very well under the fingers (though I have an allergic reaction to those who judge pieces solely on playability).  There's a great vaulting quality of how the arpeggios towards the main chord end in a leading tone, in a way letting the pianist throw the chord down, hitting the listener in the gut (and Marc-Andre Hamelin doesn't do a too-shabby job with it, either).  For a Wagnerian I actually don't hear Wagner in Catoire's works, but the Scriabin definitely rears its lovely head.  Here's another piece from that set for some contrast:

The Reverie as a piece concept arose in the late-19th century, and I've read it attributed to music that lets the mind drift off into a hazy, introspective realm (a state of reverie, if I might pretend to be clever for your chagrin).  So much of Catoire's music seems to fit this mold, not to mention this piece actually called "Reverie," and I think the heart of the piece lies not in its actual climax, but at the point of 2:19 (my favorite, but of course).  The harmony is a B-flat minor Dorian scale, lightly falling and being held over a C, suspending a transition to the V chord of F minor (the relative minor of A-flat major, the key of the piece).  He could simply strike the notes, but it's that utterly fragile, fading quality, and the placement of the transition note (C) on the most off of off beats that makes this piece incredibly beautiful.  For my money Catoire's technique with this kind of piano writing peaked with the 4 Chants du Crepuscule, which Hamelin recorded on his CD (which you should pick up before its out-of-print price point goes up further).

One could speculate on the focus on delicate sadness that rips waves through his oeuvre.  It may be good to note that he almost stopped composing completely fairly early into his career, forced into seclusion by the disapproval of his friends and family at his life choices.  A more foolish critic would focus on how his work seems all the more sad considering the downward political spiral Russian music took via hideous public trials and forced bucolicism, but I'm long past believing in artistic precognition (I'll talk of George Butterworth in the future, thank you very much).  The only truth is that this sadness can't be denied, and it takes the form of supple, organically rhythmic line work and deep, yearning melodies.  He never took radical shifts in his methods, and there is never a sense in his work of an artist desperate to prove himself.  It just is, and a gorgeous "is" it is.  Hopefully some more recordings and performances will emerge, but to give you a boost here's a bunch of his works on the great IMSLP: http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Catoire,_Georgy.  Here's to unforced beauty and kind conviction, and a happy inaugural post to you, too.

~PNK