Henk Badings - Symphonies Nos. 4 & 5 (David Porcelijn)

Information

Composer: Henk Badings

• Symphony No. 4
• Symphony No. 5

Bochum Symphony Orchestra

David Porcelijn, conductor

Date: 2015

Label: CPO

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Review

With the possible exceptions of Alphons Diepenbrock (1862-1921) and Louis Andriessen (b1939), 20th-century Dutch music remains a closed book for most music lovers. The output of the prolific, essentially self-taught Henk Badings (1907-87) carries the additional stigma of an uncertain war record. Accused of collaboration during the Nazi occupation when he was installed as head of The Hague’s rebranded Reichs-Musikkonservatorium, he was permitted to resume his career in 1947. His Seventh Symphony was commissioned by Robert Whitney and his Louisville orchestra in 1954 and, until new allegations surfaced and his reputation nosedived a second time, he achieved name recognition for his accessible electroacoustic experiments. No surprise then that it can be difficult to get a handle on such a creative personality. Only recently have his decently wrought, Hindemith-ish symphonies been heard again, courtesy of CPO’s ongoing series.

The present volume pairs the seemingly under-motivated Fourth (1943) with the tighter, more idiosyncratic Fifth, written in 1949 for the 60th anniversary of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. The traditional formal aspect of these scores is plain – there are the classic four segments and Badings even prefaces his opening movements with slow introductions – but the presence of non-Western harmonic decoration and pockets of exotic scoring rescue the idiom from total anonymity. Ironically, the insistent march-like tread of the faster movements echoes such (implicitly or explicitly) anti-Nazi symphonies as Weill’s Second and Schulhoff’s Third.

The main material of the Fifth, springing from cryptic opening motifs as was Badings’s practice, is more distinctive, the main Allegro taking off as a sort of broken-backed tango. The slow movement strikes deeper than anything else and the terseness of the finale’s peroration comes as a surprise.

While orchestral sonorities can seem a little dry-throated in Bochum, any under-projected moments must be excused given the total unfamiliarity of these scores. I’m not sure what I was expecting of a composer born in Java when it was still a Dutch colony but be warned that the predominant colour is grey.

— David Gutman

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Henk Badings (17 January 1907 – 26 June 1987) was a Dutch composer born in Bandung, Java, Dutch East Indies. Initially trained as a mining engineer and palaeontologist, he turned to music full-time in 1937. He held several academic positions, including director of the Royal Conservatory at The Hague during World War II. A prolific composer, Badings created over a thousand works, including fifteen symphonies, four string quartets, and numerous other orchestral and chamber pieces. His legacy has seen renewed interest in the 21st century, with recordings by the German label CPO and a dedicated festival in Rotterdam in 2007.

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David Porcelijn (born 7 January 1947) is a Dutch composer and conductor. He studied flute, composition, and conducting at the Royal Conservatoire of Music in The Hague. Porcelijn has conducted major orchestras worldwide, including the London Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony. He held leading roles with ensembles such as the Adelaide and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras, and the RTS Symphony Orchestra in Belgrade. A co-founder of Ensemble M, he promoted contemporary music from 1974 to 1978. Porcelijn has recorded extensively and taught conducting in both the Netherlands and Australia.

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