Search - Christopher Lyndon-Gee :: MARKEVITCH: Orchestral Music, Vol. 2 - Cantique d'Amour / L'Envol d'Icare / Concerto Grosso

Markevitch deserves better performances

Mark McCue | Denver | 06/04/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Unlike the previous reviewer who may be confusing mediocre performance for mediocre composition, I think it's fairly safe to say that the moderately alert, reasonably well-informed listener can ascribe a lot of what's going on here to rough-and-ready provincial performance standards.In a way, it's rather insulting that music of this invention, excitement, and quality would 1) be neglected all these years, and 2) then get a roughshod, slipshod presentation such as this. The Arnheim band does what it can, but the legato is almost missing, the bass-line and chording whacked to the point of fear, the glissandi slurred into slop. The meticulous Markevitch would have had none of this, but this is partly his fault since he sat on his music and didn't perform it much after he got involved with Gui organizing the Stabile in Florence. The amazing contrapuntal writing for brass in these works is so muddled here that it made me think of a flopping fish on a mudflat, breathless and desperate, so much so that I got tired finally listening around the claptrap to get the measure of the works.Even for all these negatives, I'm tacking on a star simply because 1) we need this music, and 2) maybe this will get someone able to handle it off his duff to do right by it. I'd surely like Neemi Jarvi and the Detroit Symphony to take a gander at it, or Jean-Claude Casadesus in Lille, or Dutoit if he'd ever behave and really study a score. Of course we can dream about what all this would be like with Paul Paray, Roger Desormiere, Serge Baudo, or Ernest Ansermet-- perhaps in the next life.Another thing this all brought home to me is what that debonair and persistent maestro Peter Eros has been putting up with for a long, long time."