(+++) FORMS OF FOCUS

Carl Teike: Marches, Volume 3. The Royal Swedish Navy Band conducted  by Alexander Hanson. Naxos. $19.99. 

Geoffrey Gordon: Gotham News; Debussy’s Première Rhapsodie; Fumée; Creavit Deus Hominem. Neuma Records. $15. 

     The sources of inspiration for composers are as varied as the composers themselves, so it is always intriguing to come across music that clearly has some sort of specific inspiration but whose provenance is wholly unknown. That is the case with virtually all the marches of Carl Teike (1864-1922), an exhaustive survey of which has now come to a conclusion with the third volume performed by the Royal Swedish Navy Band under Alexander Hanson. There are no fewer than 23 marches on this Naxos CD – and even more than in the earlier volumes, the works are arrangements to a greater or lesser extent. Fully 18 of them have been arranged, or at least tweaked, by various hands: 14 by Hans Ahrens, two by Erich Gutzeit, one by Sture Lundén, and one by Anders Karlsson. Neither the reasons for arrangements being needed nor the extent of them is explained in the release, adding to the mystery of a rather shadowy composer whose apparent personal modesty has resulted not so much in a veil of mystery as in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Unlike Johann Strauss Sr., whose works often bore highly specific titles relating to people and events of his time – titles whose meaning later scholarship has sometimes had to ferret out – Teike’s marches bear names that seem rather arbitrary. Some are formulaic: Krieg und Sieg, “War and Victory,” for example, and Kopf hoch, “Chin Up,” and In Freud und Leid, “In Joy and Sorrow.” Some are rather charming: Sorgenbrecher, “Worry Breaker.” Some are puzzling: Schlecht und Recht, essentially meaning “The Bad and the Good.” Some are straightforwardly celebratory of military matters: Fahnengruß, “Flag Salute,” and Friedensfeier, “Celebration of Peace,” and Die alte Garde, “The Old Guard,” and the exclamatory Fürchte nichts! That last title, meaning “Fear Nothing,” seems to stand for the upright and somewhat rousing character of so many Teike works, which were created at a time when German marches were strictly separated into concert, street and explicitly military types – those last ones being “parade marches” and not necessarily aggressive, whatever their titles may have been. Teike’s marches push no stylistic boundaries and include no out-of-the-ordinary use of instruments or expansion of the traditional complement of military ensembles. But they are uniformly well-made and structurally apt for the use of military bands, in one of which Teike himself served. Since the extent to which the 18 “arranged” marches on this CD have been altered or fine-tuned is unclear, it is hard to know whether the works in their original form had any particular shortcomings for which the arrangers endeavored to compensate – but, for what it is worth, the five marches not listed as “arranged by” anyone do not differ significantly in any way from the rest. Like the previous two discs of Teike marches, this one is very well played and certainly justifies Teike’s recently rediscovered reputation as a march composer of considerable ability within the comparatively straitened set of expectations of his time and homeland. The CD also confirms that nothing by Teike is likely to supplant other composers’ marches that are already well-known and popular for both concert and military purposes. 

     If the specific reasons for being of individual Teike marches are unknown, the opposite is the case for the orchestral works by Geoffrey Gordon (born 1968) on a Neuma Records release. The works here are tied very directly to distinct inspirations – a good thing for those interested in their provenance, although a somewhat problematic one for listeners who are not thoroughly familiar with the foundational reasons for the music’s existence. Thus, Gotham News (2018), heard first on the disc, is a string-orchestra work directly inspired by a 1955 Willem de Kooning mixed-media piece that hangs in a gallery in Buffalo, New York. The art is essentially a great splash of color and chaos, intended to portray the hectic realities of New York City. But what will listeners unfamiliar with it take from Gordon’s music? His piece, well-performed by the Radom Chamber Orchestra conducted by Szymon Morus, is not a musical portrayal of the visual art but a response to and reflection of it. How effective it is will depend on an audience’s knowledge of its reason for being: on its own it is a nicely arranged string-orchestra work that is interesting if not particularly gripping – it comes across better if connected with its inspiration. It is followed on the CD by two closely attached 2022 pieces, one having inspired the other: Fumée traces to a work by Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) – which Gordon came to by way of the Première Rhapsodie by Debussy, which in turn Gordon himself arranged as it is heard here. The pieces are played back-to-back, the Debussy first, by clarinetist Horácio Ferreira and the Hong Kong Sinfonietta under Christoph Poppen. The underlying complexity of the inspiration (Debussy, to Hahn, to Gordon and Debussy/Gordon) is here unnecessary for listeners to know: the works stand well on their own, their atmospheric elements clearly delineated both in the solo instrument and in the accompaniment. The Debussy arrangement, of a piece originally written for clarinet and piano and then orchestrated by Debussy himself, fits the material well, and Fumée is indeed smoky and smokelike in the expressive way if wafts here and there, blown back and forth both within the clarinet line and in the ensemble material. Fumée is a piece that it is possible to enjoy without knowing anything at all about how it came to be; indeed, its inherent tribute to Impressionism comes through quite well without requiring any knowledge of Gordon’s thinking about Debussy and Hahn and their era and sensibilities. The opposite is the case for Creavit Deus Hominem (2024), a four-movement oboe concerto commissioned by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra for its principal oboist, José Luis García Vegara, and here played by him with the ensemble conducted by Duncan Ward. This piece is imbued with very specific history related to Synchromism, an art movement founded in Paris in 1912 by two American artists. The movement’s underlying conceit was that color could be treated as music in a kind of induced synesthesia. With this specific and relatively little-known backdrop, the four movements of Gordon’s concerto bear clear titles that are intended to be evocative: Still Life, Cosmic, Study after Michelangelo’s Pietà, and “Creavit Deus Hominem” (So God Created Man) – that last title drawn from Genesis 1:27. The four movements certainly give the oboist plenty of opportunities to showcase his instrument’s capabilities and his own, but they are not especially clearly differentiated – titles could be swapped without impinging on the feelings evoked – and the extent to which the individual movements and their collective effect are meaningful depends wholly on an understanding of Gordon’s inspiration and the way it led him to assemble these particular sounds from this particular instrumental combination. On its own, the music is well-made although rather discursive – the timpanic opening of the finale and the “formative” brass material that follows are arguably its most effective portions – but absent an understanding of its inspiration, the work does not hang together particularly well. Gordon writes knowledgeably both for individual instruments and for ensembles. But because he is so steeped in the nonmusical referents of the music on this CD, he requires audiences to research the pieces in order to be able to appreciate them fully. Gordon is scarcely the only contemporary composer with this expectation, but it is interesting that he sometimes does write music inspired by music – as in the Debussy/Hahn material here – and is at his most interestingly communicative when he does so.