Listenable Obscuriana

So when Dan was in town this weekend, I quickly tossed together a mix CD for him of recent or relatively obscure classical stuff I'd been listening to over the last several months. On second glance it's a playlist I find pretty interesting, so, forthwith: offered up as a set of odd-corner classical recommendations.

(Fifteen minutes of the CD would have been Per Nørgård's Frost Psalms, if I hadn't lent that out to Stu a few weeks ago. Not really seasonal, anyway.)

Vítĕzslav Novák, "In the Church" from Slovak Suite for Small Orchestra (1903)
Novák was Czech, a student of Dvořak; the Slovak Suite is a pretty straight-up picturesque tone poem, and the hymnal opening movement here is just gorgeous.

Peter Schickele, String Quartet No. 5, "A Year in the Country" (1998), 3rd movement ("Bugs")
Schickele's the weird genius behind P.D.Q. Bach, but he composes outside that persona too; this CD from the Audubon Quartet, with two quartets and a piano quintet, is incredibly good. Smart, lucid, charismatic, wholesome, often a bit cheesy. Case in point, naming a movement after bugs. Which is kind of cartoonishly apt, but doesn't get at how delicate and charming and well-done the movement is.

Erkki-Sven Tüür, Action-Passion-Illusion (1993), 1st movement
Already noted this one a while back. Further listening: Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements; pretty much anything by Bohuslav Martinů.

Lukas Foss, Clarinet Concerto (1988), 2nd movement
Richard Stoltzman commissioned and recorded this piece and then left it where most clarinet concertos end up, out to pasture. It's a top-shelf piece, though, snappily neoclassical with some light modernism blurring the edges. (Way better, incidentally, than anything else I've heard by Lukas Foss.) The scherzo movement comes off like a bumpkinish Stravinsky parody, fun and good-natured. The work started off as a chamber arrangement, which you can also still find on CD.

Andrzej Panufnik, Homage to Chopin (1949/66), 3rd movement
This is a short, modest andantino for flute and strings (originally a wordless vocalise), a slowly spinning-out old Polish melody, I think. Elegant stuff.

Einojuhani Rautavaara, Vespers (1971), 1st Katisma
Already remarked upon. Halleluja, halleluja, halle-lu-uu-jaaa.

Sebastian Currier, Night Time (1998), 5th movement
Already remarked upon. The last movement is a sparkling little soundscape, like a small Arvo Pärt piece with a very quick metabolic rate.

Steven Mackey, Indigenous Instruments (1989), 3rd movement
This was Mackey's breakout piece, as loopy as anything he's written since; a six-instrument chamber ensemble, the instruments tuned a bit out of relation to each other, plinking and sawing away at what Mackey calls "vernacular music from a culture that doesn't exist." It anchors this recent-ish CD from eighth blackbird; there's some good stuff in the other pieces on the disc, too, though it's a bit more hit-and-miss.

Witold Lutosławski, Paganini Variations (1941)
Lutosławski's two-piano gloss on the ever-popular theme came before his avant-garde days, so it's no further out than Prokofiev or Stravinsky, and it actually shares a lot with the more skittish, glittering parts of Rachmaninov's variations, too. I like this CD, which is mostly mainstream esoterica for four-hand piano, Kurtag and Ligeti and Berio.

Jennifer Higdon, City Scape (2002), 1st movement
What Nate said.

Gabriel Fauré, Nocturne No.13 in B minor (1921)
Late Fauré, gotta love it. Subtle, lovingly crafted late romanticism well into the twentieth century. Listen to his Second Violin Sonata, too, which is one of the best.

Felix Mendelssohn, Piano Trio No.2 in C Minor, op.66 (1845), 4th movement
I hadn't heard of this piece till this year; I don't know if it's actually obscure, but at any rate it's a fine specimen in that line of lyrical Germanic chamber music going from Schubert to Schumann to Brahms. The fourth movement has a pretty standard, stirring light-coming-out agenda, which Mendelssohn accomplishes partly by quilting swatches of the Doxology theme (I don't know what the Lutherans called the tune back in the day) into the crucial climaxes. The phrases are fractured enough that it has a surprisingly Ivesy effect, though of course it's more orderly.

Percy Grainger, Handel in the Strand (1911)
Wind bands play this & several other Grainger chestnuts all the time; this has become my favorite of the bunch. I'm getting good mileage out of this CD of orchestral arrangements. Grainger indicated that Handel in the Strand was "to be played to, or without, clog dancing," which could accurately be said of all music.