Charles Koechlin - Offrande musicale sur le nom de BACH; Les bandar-log (Heinz Holliger)

Information

Composer: Charles Koechlin

• Les bandar-log, Op. 176 "Scherzo des singes"
• Offrande musicale sur le nom de BACH, Op. 187

Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra

Heinz Holliger, conductor

Date: 2007

Label: Hänssler Classic

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Review

It's possible, but, because of its tremendous intellectual complexity, it is not necessarily easy to love Charles Koechlin's music. Hänssler Classics should be commended for their series of recordings of Koechlin's music in general, and for this disc combining two of his most imposing orchestral scores: Les Bandar-log and Offrande musicale sur le non de BACH. The former is a 20-minute scherzo taking as its subject matter an episode from Kipling's Jungle Book involving monkeys and music; apparently, if you put enough monkeys in a room long enough, they'll create everything from tonality to atonality to polytonality. The latter is a nearly 50-minute-long compendium of virtually anything and everything that can be done contrapuntally with the pitches B flat, A, C, and B natural (B-A-C-H in German musical nomenclature). Both works require listeners' undivided attention. Without it, it's too easy to get lost in Les Bandar-log's multiple monkey fugues, and in the Offrande musicale's manifold mazes of counterpoint. Attentive listeners, though, will be rewarded with some of the most inventive and entertaining music written in the twentieth century. These performances by Heinz Holliger leading the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart open up the details of the scores: the intelligent design, the luminous colors, the wide-ranging emotions, and the almost unfathomable intricacies. Captured in richly detailed, warmly sonorous digital sound, this disc may help revive interest in Koechlin's work.

-- James Leonard, AllMusic

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Charles Koechlin (27 November 1867 – 31 December 1950) was a French composer, teacher and musicologist. Among his teachers at the Paris Conservatoire were Jules Massenet, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel and Jean Roger-Ducasse. He was a political radical all his life and a passionate enthusiast for such diverse things as medieval music, The Jungle Book of Rudyard Kipling, Johann Sebastian Bach, film stars (especially Lilian Harvey and Ginger Rogers), traveling, stereoscopic photography and socialism. As a composer, Koechlin was enormously prolific, and was highly eclectic in inspiration and technique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Koechlin

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Heinz Holliger (born 21 May 1939) is a Swiss virtuoso oboist, composer and conductor. He was born in Langenthal, Switzerland and studied at the conservatory of Bern. He studied composition with Sándor Veress and Pierre Boulez. Celebrated for his versatility and technique, Holliger is among the most prominent oboists of his generation. His repertoire includes Baroque and Classical pieces, but he has regularly engaged in lesser known pieces of Romantic music, as well as his own compositions. As a composer, Holliger has written many works in a variety of media. Many of his works have been recorded for the ECM label.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Holliger

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