Melism Launches Skalkottas Recording Project

At the beginning of this year, the French Melism label released the first volume in a series of world premiere recordings of the music of Nikos Skalkottas. The Amazon.com Web page for this album describes Skalkottas as “the most important Greek composer of the first half of the 20th century.” I suspect that the primary reason for that “first half” qualifier is that, during the second half of the century, the reputation of Skalkottas, who died in 1949, became overshadowed by that of Mikis Theodorakis. (In spite of his impressively large catalog of compositions, Theodorakis may still be best known for the music he composed for the film Zorba the Greek, which quickly achieved “pop” status during the mid-Sixties.)

Like many, I first became aware of Skalkottas through the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos. This came about through what was basically a happy accident. Having grown frustrated with how my Fantasia album had tampered with the score for Modest Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,” I sought out one that took the music more seriously. I found it on a Columbia recording of Mitropoulos conducting the New York Philharmonic. The album also included two popular works by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: the Opus 31 “Marche Slave” preceding Mussorgsky on the first side, and the Opus 45 “Capriccio Italien” beginning the second side. The remainder of the second side was identified as “Four Greek Dances, Opus 11” by Skalkottas.

Those four tracks were entirely new to me, and they quickly became my favorite portion of the album. I knew as little about the folk sources and instruments for these selections as I knew about the background for Antonín Dvořák’s “Slavonic” dances; but I was just a secondary school kid with little interest in such details! Much later in life, I regretted the fact that I had not replaced that album with a CD version when I had to give up all my vinyls due to lack of space in the San Francisco condominium where my wife and I currently reside.

Nevertheless, Skalkottas slipped off my radar until I received word of the Melism release. This provided me with an opportunity to learn more about this composer and to listen to a wider spectrum of his compositions. Fortunately, it also allowed me to revisit the selections that Mitropoulos had recorded for Columbia. It turned out that Skalkottas had composed 36 of those dances between 1931 and 1936, distributed across three suites, each consisting of twelve dances. Sadly, the scores for these suites available through IMSLP are all incomplete; and, apparently, they were not published until 1957, long after the composer’s death.

The Melism album presents twelve of the dances taken from all three of the suites. The recording was made in San Francisco in 1957 with Gregory Millar conducting the Little Symphony Orchestra of San Francisco. The CD offers the first stereophonic release of these twelve tracks. Mitropoulos recorded his performances on January 9, 1956; but Columbia did not release the album until 1959. All four of his selections were included among the twelve that Millar had recorded, so listening to this music was very much like encountering an almost-forgotten old friend. All of those coarse qualities that made the Mitropoulos recording so exciting were just as evident in Millar’s interpretations.

To be fair however, those dance movements are far from representative of the overall Skalkottas canon. Following his graduation from the Athens Conservatoire in 1920, he relocated to Berlin, where he lived from 1921 to 1933. Much of that time was spent studying under Arnold Schoenberg; but he found his own approaches to atonality, which he balanced against tonality (such as he found when he was developing sources from Greek folk music). He was also influenced by Schoenberg’s interest in classical forms, and the Melism album begins with a suite composed in 1929. This was originally composed for violin and “little orchestra;” but the Melism recording presents the composer’s subsequent version for violin and piano. One can appreciate the ambiguous qualities of atonality without confusing this music with Schoenberg’s own works. This is also the case for “The Return of Odysseus,” an overture for “great orchestra” completed near the end of the composer’s life (which includes a chillingly frenetic fugue), along with a version for two pianos performed on the new album. Finally there are three songs presented by mezzo Angelica Cathariou with pianist Nikolaos Samaltanos. All of these selections are world premiere recordings.

Taken as a whole this recently-released album is a journey of discovery that offers a closer look at a long-ignored aspect of twentieth-century composition practices.