Skalkottas: Different Roles for the Piano to Play

Of the six CDs that remain prior to the most recent BIS release, all but the last involve a variety of different ways in which composer Nikos Skalkottas deployed the piano. Those approaches are as follows:

1. Accompanying art songs
2. Solo concerto instrument
3. A pair of concerto instruments
4. Ballet music
5. Solo piano compositions

These genres account for both atonal and tonal approaches to composition.

Skalkottas on the cover of the album of his collection of sixteen songs on texts by Hrissos Esperas (courtesy of Naxos of America)

The first category is represented by a collection of sixteen songs composed for mezzo and piano. All of the texts are by Hrissos Esperas. In the absence of a booklet, I was able to find background on a cdandlp Web page, where the nature of the texts is described as follows:

Esperas's texts find poetic parallels with nature—sea, wind, sky, the spring, autumn—and his existential loneliness. The phrase “a futile life,” pointing to a withered fig tree on a barren shore rooted to a blighted rock might be self-referential.

What is interesting is that this cycle was composed during World War II, but the music tends to reflect on how Skalkottas’ approach to atonality follows his earlier departures from his studies with Arnold Schoenberg. Indeed, the cdandlp Web page also includes a review by “Uncle Dave Lewis,” which includes the following text:

This work, consisting of 16 settings of Greek poet Hrissos Esperas, is what you might get in combining Schoenberg's The Book of the Hanging Gardens with his Suite for piano, Op. 25. It works, too -- the hard-bitten, highly rhythmic piano part proves a well-managed and appropriate foil for Skalkottas' soaring, uncompromisingly chromatic vocal lines.

The two concertos are also atonal. In this case, however, the overall rhetoric tends to be shaped by the composer’s approach to instrumentation. Thus, sonorities guide the ear through familiar structural details. The two-piano composition is identified as a concertino, presumably because the three movements have shorter durations than one encounters in Skalkottas’ “concerto” compositions. It is also worth noting that the two-piano concerto is followed by an unexpected “punch line.” This is a piece that Skalkottas called “Morceau characteristique” with the subtitle “Nocturne-divertimento.” The listener then discovers that the music was scored for solo xylophone and orchestra, not the sort of instrument one associates with “nocturnal” qualities (unless one happens to be Béla Bartók)!

As might be expected, the ballet music is, for the most part, tonal. While all the selections were composed for solo piano (performed by Lorenda Ramou), there is a rich diversity in rhetorical strategies. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that attentive listeners will grasp the relationships among the music, the titles of the movements, and the narrative realized by the choreography.

The title of the solo piano album is From Berlin to Athens. The pianist is again Ramou. It is in this collection that we encounter works composed before Skalkottas began his studies with Arnold Schoenberg. The first two three-movement suites on the album are world premiere recordings. Both were composed in 1924, and the second of the suites serves up some engagingly jazzy qualities. There is also a world premiere recording of a dance suite entitled The Gnomes, which seems to pursue an alternative path than the one encountered in the orchestral tone poem with the same title.

Once again, diversity is decidedly the order of the day.