The pleasures and frustrations of Tansman

February 26, 3:09 PMSF Classical Music ExaminerScott Foglesong

Previous Next

1 comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the SF Classical Music Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Recently I've been getting to know some of orchestral music of Alexandre Tansman (1897 - 1986) thanks to Oleg Caetani and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's traversal of his nine symphonies, on Chandos.

My sole experience with Tansman prior to this exploration came from the occasional kid's piano piece tucked into an omnibus volume that I would use for teaching, back when I taught piano regularly. (I'm almost exclusively a classroom teacher now.)

Most of those volumes are arranged chronologically, and so Tansman would routinely appear along with Kabalevsky and Bartók near the end. Generally speaking the pieces were good, not anything to write home about, not particularly offensive to anybody, and definitely learnable by your basic pre-teen piano student.

My impressions gleaned from listening through the symphonies (including the oddly-named, five-movement "Quatre mouvements pour orchestra") are very similar to the piano pieces: nice, good, nothing particularly offensive, all quite listenable and engaging enough in a non-engaging sort of way.

Listening more closely to Tansman challenges you to a game of name-that-style: here some Stravinsky, here some Ravel, here some Szymanowski, here some Hindemith, here some *your name here*.

Just try to hear the opening of Symphony No. 6 without thinking Stravinsky, just try, and then just try to avoid hearing Honegger by way of Ravel in the continuation. The ending of said symphony comes off as Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, as adapted by Aaron Copland as a cowboy ballet.

That's the problem. I keep running up against a lack of a really personal style; I really doubt that I could ever recognize a Tansman work just by his personal style alone, since I'm quite hard-pressed to come up with anything that seems really uniquely his. It's a smorgasbord of borrowed styles, rather than a single identifiable voice.

Mine is hardly an original insight, by the way; other writers have noted the same thing. Fanfare's Peter Rabinowitz, for example: "I’m pleased that new recordings of his music have been flourishing over the past five or six years, and I look forward to the completion of what Chandos promises as a complete run of his nine symphonies. But I can’t say that I was galvanized by this release—and I can’t say that I heard a voice with the kind of individuality you hear, say, even in Martinu."

On the other hand, another Fanfare writer, Paul A. Snook, argues the case for Tansman's being worthy of higher consideration: "But first of all, it is necessary to rebut the critical shibboleth—which annotator Caroline Rae harps upon fulsomely—that Tansman was merely an epigone of Stravinsky, with whom he was admittedly personally quite close. As if any worthwhile composer spending the years between the wars in Paris could help being influenced by the titanic Russian! However, anyone who listens to this music with open ears (and an open mind) would have to concede that its most prominent qualities are purely and unmistakably Tansmanian."

I'm not so sure that my ears and mind (open or otherwise) hear anything purely or unmistakably Tansmanian, however, unless "unmistakably Tansmanian" means "pastiche."

If I am reminded of anything in particular, it is books on 20th-century harmony; many passages in the symphonies come across just like illustrative examples in textbooks that demonstrate, say, octatonicism, or parallelism, or non-diatonic contrapuntal techniques, or the like. For those in the readership who have been through Vincent Persechetti's Twentieth Century Harmony, a Tansman symphony is likely to elicit a whiff of school-days dejà vu.

I do not mean any of this to condemn the man's music; it's quite enjoyable and worth hearing. As a matter of fact, it could make an excellent intro-to-modernism kind of repertory, part of a gentle approach that could begin with, say, Vaughan Williams and then move into some of those cultured French composers who employed a modern-ish language without scaring the dinkus out of inexperienced listeners -- Honegger, perhaps. Then some Copland (not the Piano Variations variety.)

Tansman would fit in very nicely there; nice stuff, very approachable and listenable, incorporating some modernist elements in a thoroughly non-threatening way, very much cultured French idiom with splashes of stuff from all over the map.

I'm really quite sorry that I never encountered this music when I was a teenager; it would have absolutely sent me. I adored mild modernism at that time -- a pivotal listening experience was the Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra, for example, and I was besotted with Bartók (and still am.) I remember coming almost unglued during a Denver Symphony concert (yes, there used to be a Denver Symphony) of Alexander Tcherepnin's first symphony.

But time passes, and one's taste changes. In Tansman I am finding attractiveness, worthiness, enjoyability, and listenability, but I am not sent. Pity.

Oh, well: they can't all be Stravinsky.

You might want to consider downloading the Caetani/Melbourne Tansman recordings and save yourself some dough in the process.

ClassicsOnline carries all three volumes in mp3/320 format for a very reasonable $9.99 a pop. However, the Chandos CDs are dual-layer SACD, making their full retail $18.99 justified if you have an SACD setup, nor is mp3/320 exactly sonic perfection.

Here they are:

Volume 1: Symphonies 4, 6, and 6

Volume 2: Symphonies 7, 8, 9

Volume 3: Symphonies 2, 3 and the "Quatre Mouvements"

ClassicsOnline includes the booklet with liner notes for volumes 1 and 3, but not, for some inexplicable reason, volume 2.

Alternatively:

The ClassicalShop offers these albums in Lossless format.

You can get them on CD (dual-layer with SACD) from ArkivMusic: Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3.