Monday, April 3, 2023

Exploring Skalkottas on BIS Records

Exactly one month ago, I wrote my first article about an album of music by the Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas produced by Sweden-based BIS records. My previous encounter with such albums had been sporadic, to say the least. Thus, when preparing my background material for that album, I discovered from a review by Nikos A. Dontas “that BIS had accumulated a generous number of CDs devoted entirely to compositions by Skalkottas.”

This piqued my curiosity, particularly since any opportunity I had to write about Skalkottas was punctuated by reflecting on how few opportunities there were! It turned out that, as a result of poking around in the BIS catalog, Dontas’ “generous number” turned out to be seventeen. As a result, I find that I am now in a position to turn my plan for a “Skalkottas project” into a reality.

Rather than work my way through the entire collection album-by-album, I am going to try to work with useful clusters, as I had done with “anthology” releases. One of those anthologies was Sony Classical’s Dimitri Mitropoulos: The Complete RCA and Columbia Album Collection, which was particularly appropriate, since my “first contact” with Skalkottas took place on one of those Columbia albums. Following the chronological order of the BIS catalog numbers, the first cluster will consist of three CDs of orchestral music conducted by Nikos Christodoulou.

Album cover of the very first BIS release of music by Skalkottas (courtesy of Naxos of America)

On the first of those CDs, Christodoulou conducts the Malmö Symphony Orchestra. The other two albums were recorded with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Ironically, the first three tracks of the first CD present the same composition found on the first three tracks of the most recent BIS release, the composer’s violin concerto.

For the most part, all three of these early albums provide aspects of Skalkottas’ studies with Arnold Schoenberg. However, as I have previously observed, Skalkottas’ found his own approaches to atonality that tended to be less rigorous than the techniques that Schoenberg pursued. At the same time, Skalkottas had a “tonal side,” which basically reflected his interests in Greek folk music.

That latter category is represented almost entirely by the Greek Dances collection of 36 movements, each associated with a different region of Greece. Skalkottas composed these between 1931 and 1936. Many of the dances were given new orchestrations in 1949. In addition, seven of them were rearranged for string orchestra in 1936; and they account for the final seven tracks on the Malmö album. Personally, I prefer the sonorities of a full orchestra, which lends itself to “earthy” qualities in the themes that get “smoothed over” when sonorities are limited to the string family.

Skalkottas’ atonality, on the other hand, requires more than a bit of aural examination. In preparing his three CDs, Christodoulou selected concertos for three different instruments. As already observed, the first of these is the violin. The remaining solo instruments are double bass and piano (the first of three concertos). I have to say that I was particularly drawn to the double bass solo on the second CD taken by Vassilis Papavassiliou, and this is definitely music that I would appreciate hearing in a concert setting. That CD concludes with the second set of dances arranged for string orchestra, this time only three of them.

Both the second and third CDs also introduce the listener to the “theatrical” side of Skalkottas’ compositions. The third CD begins with the score for “The Maiden and Death,” a one-act ballet, whose music was composed in 1938 and revised in 1946. The second CD presents the incidental music for a “Fairy Drama” entitled “Mayday Spell.” This requires a full orchestra, as well as a soprano (þóra Einarsdóttir) for two of the ten movements.

There is thus considerable diversity in how Skalkottas worked with a large ensemble; and, given the richness of his instrumentation, it is more than a pity that there are so few (if any) opportunities to listen to his music in performance.

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