Pencil sketch of Nikos Skalkottas (drawn by Véronique Fournier-Pouyet from a portrait photograph, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)
Some readers may recall that, this past August, I reported that the French Melism label released the first volume in a series of world premiere recordings of the music of Nikos Skalkottas. At that time it seems to have slipped my attention that Naxos had launched its own series with the Athens State Orchestra, whose first volume, entitled The Neoclassical Skalkottas, had been released in roughly the same time frame. The second volume, Dance of the Waves, will be released this coming Friday; and, as expected, Amazon.com is currently processing pre-orders. For those interested in up-to-date thoroughness, I hope to provide an account of that first volume in the near future.
As is clear from his Wikipedia page, Skalkottas’ life was a frustrating one. As was observed this past August, he graduated from the Athens Conservatoire in 1920, after which he relocated to Berlin, spending much of the time between 1921 and 1933 studying under Arnold Schoenberg. On the new Dance of the Waves album, Schoenberg’s influence is most evident in Skalkottas’ first suite for large orchestra, composed in 1929 and revised in 1935.
Like Schoenberg’s Opus 29, this suite draws upon traditional structures. However, Opus 29 was composed for a chamber septet of clarinets, strings, and piano, lending transparent textures to the composer’s strategies for avoiding a tonal center. Skalkottas, on the other hand, worked with much lusher sonorities, balancing the atonal framework with rich instrumentation. Ironically, while it is not that difficult to find a recording of Schoenberg’s suite, the performance conducted by Stefanos Tsialis on Dance of the Waves is a world premiere recording. It is also a bit ironic that the Melism album includes another suite composed in 1929 for violin and “little orchestra,” whose rhythmic rhetoric seems to owe less to Schoenberg while also establishing a firm footing in atonality. (The Melism recording is a world premiere of the version of this suite for violin and piano.)
The other side of Skalkottas’ composing reflects his love of Greek folk music. This is most evident in the 36 Greek dances that he composed for full orchestra between 1931 and 1936, distributed across three suites, each consisting of twelve dances. The Melism album presented twelve of these dances but sampled them across all three suites. Dance of the Waves, on the other hand, presents the first suite in its entirety.
This includes two of the dances that Dimitri Mitropoulos had recorded in January of 1956 with the New York Philharmonic for a Columbia album that also included two popular works by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: the Opus 31 “Marche Slave,” preceding Modest Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” on the first side, and the Opus 45 “Capriccio Italien” beginning the second side. In other words, after having recorded three popular selections, Columbia seemed willing to let Mitropoulos indulge in a sample of his own personal favorites! As a result, most of my generation that knows anything at all about Skalkottas probably got started through that Mitropoulos recording!
The remaining selection on Dance of the Waves consists of three excerpts from Skalkottas’ ballet suite The Sea, composed between 1948 and 1949 (which happens to be the year in which the composer died). The entire suite consisted of eleven movements for large orchestra. However, Skalkottas arranged three of the movements for chamber orchestra, and those arrangements were the only accounts of his ballet score that he heard in performance before his sudden and unexpected death, probably due to a ruptured hernia. Dance of the Waves provides the world premiere of the chamber orchestra version of those movements.
While I am definitely interested in further Melism releases, listening to Dance of the Waves has definitely piqued my attention and curiosity about The Neoclassical Skalkottas.
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