Neoclassical Skalkottas on Naxos

courtesy of Naxos of America

This past Sunday, when I wrote about the Naxos album of music by Nikos Skalkottas entitled Dance of the Waves, I observed that this was actually the second volume of a series. The series had been launched this past August with an album entitled The Neoclassical Skalkottas. I promised readers that I would provide an account of this initial volume, and that is what I shall now do.

For the most part, Dance of the Waves addressed two significant influences of Skalkottas’ efforts as a composer. One was the efforts of Arnold Schoenberg, with whom Skalkottas had studied in Berlin between 1921 and 1933, to compose music that lacked a tonal center. I observed that Skalkottas seemed to respond to Schoenberg’s efforts by forging different paths to a common goal. The other influence that figured on Dance of the Waves was Skalkottas’ love of Greek folk music. The album was thus one of contrasts, but there was an engaging balance between the two influences.

By 1945 Skalkottas was beginning to drift away from the Schoenberg influence, repurposing the tonality of the Greek folk sources for more symphonic purposes. Due to his early death in 1949, this turned out to be the “final period” of his journey as a composer. One of the products of that period was included on Dance of the Waves, the excerpts from his ballet suite The Sea. On The Neoclassical Skalkottas two of the compositions in this genre are abstract, a four-movement sinfonietta in B-flat major and the four-movement “Classical Symphony,” scored for wind orchestra. The album also includes another source of excerpts from a dance suite, The Land and the Sea of Greece, originally composed for solo piano. The excerpts are collected under the title Four Images. Finally, the album concludes with “Ancient Greek March,” scored for chamber orchestra, which lacks the sharp edges of Skalkottas’ three suites of Greek dances.

One can appreciate that Skalkottas “needed a break” from atonality. However, the selections on The Neoclassical Skalkottas come across as more than a little too bland, almost as if he was trying to retreat to a nineteenth century that had never influenced him very much. I missed those “sharp edges,” which I had encountered, even in tonal form, on the Dance of the Waves album. His Wikipedia page suggests links to the neoclassicism of Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók; but there was significantly more “neo” in the efforts of both of these composers than Skalkottas seems to have been able to muster. I found myself thinking more about Sergei Prokofiev’s shift away from sharp edges after he returned to Russia.