The Magic Lantern

Mel Bonis / Piano Quartet No. 1 in B flat major, Op. 69 (1905) - I. Moderato

Mélanie Bonis (1858-1937) is a completely new voice on the scene. She was a French woman composer whose real name was Mélanie Domange née Bonis, but when composing, she used the pseudonym Mel Bonis in an attempt to gain more recognition.

During her lifetime, she received great praise from her renowned male colleagues such as Gounod and Saint-Saëns but long before her death, she was totally forgotten.

Gordan Nikolitch, violin
Jean-Philippe Vasseur, viola
Jean-Marie Trotereau, cello
Laurent Martin, piano

Antanas Rekašius (1928-2003) / Symphony No. 7 - III. Largo

Juozas Domarkas (Conductor), Lithuanian State Philharmonic Orchestra (Orchestra)

Via BBC News, Monday 6 October, 2003:

A gun was found by the body of Antanas Rekasius who had a bullet wound to the head and police suspect suicide. Rekasius, 75, had been living in poverty and barely able to pay the bills on his three-bedroom apartment. His work, which included symphonies and ballet music, was performed both in the ex-USSR and abroad, and was known for its humorous touches.Worried about his lack of income, he had been suffering from depression, police in the Lithuanian capital said. Rekasius’s compositions had a non-conformist quality and were full of humour and the grotesque, the Lithuanian Music Information and Publishing Centre writes.

Apart from numerous symphonies and ballets, he wrote music for children including song cycles and piano pieces. The Baltic Music Information Centre once described him as “the most controversial composer on the Lithuanian Scene… his fondness for clowning sometimes overshadowing the serious nature of his work”. Stunts he employed included switching off the lights for the finale of his fifth symphony and once having singers bare gold teeth at the audience. Antanas Rekasius’s work was performed in the United States, Italy, France, Finland, Sweden, Germany and Hungary, as well as Lithuania and Russia.

Lili Boulanger / Vieille prière bouddhique (pour ténor, choeurs et orchestre)

Michel Senechal, tenor
Chorale Elisabeth Brasseur
Orchestre de l’Association des Concerts Lamoureaux/Igor Markevitch

via Steve Schwartz:

Many composers have died young: Mozart and Gershwin, to name only two. Yet, if we think of career length, Mozart and Gershwin had at least fifteen great years. Boulanger had only five, and the shortness of that career adds to the poignance of her death. There just isn’t all that much work to allow us to make extravagant claims for her. Her main influence is late Debussy (compare with the latter’s Trois Ballades de François Villon of 1910 and Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien), with his stripped-down harmonies of fourths and fifths, but she quickly struck out on her own. The liner notes point out how much of her work anticipates Honegger’s “oratorio” vein of Le Roi David and Judith. What there is of Boulanger is of very high quality indeed. 

…

I find her strongest suit a chant-like, hypnotic quality, repeating a few very strong motives to powerful effect, as in the Pie Jesu, Psaume 129, and the Vielle prière bouddhique. Boulanger was a composer mainly of promise - I would easily say of great promise. Her death robbed us all.

Everyone should listen to this. It’s truly one of the most beautiful pieces of music I have ever heard.

Mieczysław Weinberg / Symphony No.18 Op.138 - III.’Dearest little berry, you do not know the pain in my heart’

performed by USSR Symphony Orchestra (Fedoseyev)

This is my favorite movement of Mieczysław Weinberg’s 18th Symphony and has some of the most beautiful choral writing I have ever heard.

via The Haunting Beauty of Moisei Weinberg:

Weinberg, who was victimized by the two most murderous regimes in European history, survived to write music that was poised and passionate, but rarely self-indulgently tragic. For this, he has not been forgiven, which is why you have most likely never heard of him.

But let’s back up. Weinberg was born a Jew in Poland in 1919, which meant that he suffered official anti-Semitism of the Polish, Nazi, and Soviet varieties. His close family died in a Nazi extermination camp, but he eventually made his way to Moscow. In 1948, Stalin ordered the murder of his father-in-law, the well-known actor Solomon Mikhoels, heralding the start of a terrifying new pogrom. Only in a context of such grotesque misfortune could you call it lucky that the composer was arrested and sent to a gulag in 1953: Stalin died that year, and Weinberg was released. He outlived all his persecutors, and died in 1996. The permutations of his name are eloquent of the shifting, treacherous terrain in which he spent his life: Mieczyslaw, Mieczyslav, Moisei, and Moishei, and Moisey were variously combined with Weinberg, Vainberg, Wainberg, and Vajnberg. He is a librarian’s nightmare. (Searching on eMusic isn’t simple, either.)

…

 You can’t hear this Muscovite music teeter between humor and tragedy, between buoyant harmonies and clanging dissonance, without thinking of Shostakovich. That nervous titan of Russian culture so dominated musical life that Weinberg has been dismissed as a “little Shostakovich,” as if there were only room for one composer in the story of Soviet music (okay, two: Sergei Prokofiev).

…

But in Shostakovich, you can usually hear the mark of terror; Weinberg possesses a more romantic core. He does not share the tendency to explode moments of serenity or mystery with an outburst of violent crudeness.

…

All this restraint saddled Weinberg with a reputation as a minor dullard, but there is something heroic about scraping straightforward beauty out of ugly times. During the battle of Sarajevo in the early 1990s, a cellist defied the snipers to play Bach in a central square, determined to fight violence with sublimity. The opening adagio of Weinberg’s solo cello sonata, with its ceaseless, Bach-like invocation, hints at a similar belief that somehow a lone line of music can stand as a bulwark against terror.