Charles Koechlin, 1867-1950: His Life and Works (Contemporary Music Studies, Vol. 1)

Rating:
Summary: comprehensive,analytical and provoking
Review: Robert Orledge is a consummate musicologist working in Liverpool, and this work on the neglected French composer Charles Koechlin is a wonderful profile of his entire life's work. Koechlin was a contemporary of Debussy, and Satie, yet we seldom have heard his music. Even today there is scant recordings, and what there was in the past was inferior to our modern ears now. I recall an excellent early disc however with the BBC Orchestra under Antal Dorati with Koechlin's Bander-Log, with Messiaen and Boulez works included.Today however there are exceptions with conductor Simon Rattle, and David Zinman here. The Koechlin aesthetic followed a lifelong fascination with a full spectrum of conceptual complexities in nature, but also classical mythology, Roman civilization, the jungle, the night, starlit sky, dreams and fantasy, yearnings for distant shores, also the sea and water. Water in particular inspired the wonderful set of piano solos "Paysages et marines (1915-16) subtitled Landscapes and Seascapes.There you will find the piano evoking a fluidity largly by sustained sounds in the lower regions of the piano,shaped yet waiting for its full decay.Creativily Koechlin was a miniaturist finding genres(as the piano solo)as deep recepticles for these countless images,where one work could scour through some 40 images. The Chants de Nectaires is an example and has an unusual premise as well, it is a work for unaccompanied flute of some three hours,with an array of dances,prayers, and songs. The virtuoso Pierre-Yves Artaud has edited a performing version, after years of neglect.Koechlin's other side is the Sonatinas for piano which are childlike in their harmonic simplicity,yet not facile in their conception. Orledge identifies all of the genres in Koechlin's creative edifice with a deep focus on the elements of music at work here. Rhythm was not as important as harmony for instnace,yet in melody reigns supreme.He abhorred rhythmic excursion for the mere sake of it. If anything at all Koechlin's creativity utilized his innate gift for lyricism.And being lyrical implies a reduced focus on harmonic progression of rhythmic complexity. Orledge admirable covers each in succession. His life is treated in periods rather than genres, in that he wrote in each,however incomplete and at times immature that creative process proved to be.Also there is a look at his uniqueness as an orchestrator.There are wonderful vintage photographs as well as numerous musical examples, many being reductions and transpositions from the original source.