Charles Koechlin - Les Bandar-Log скачать в хорошем качестве

Charles Koechlin - Les Bandar-Log

Les Bandar-Log, symphonic poem based on Kipling's Jungle Book (1939-40) BBC Symphony Orchestra Antal Dorati Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) was the grand old man of the French avant-garde and the unsung hero of the twentieth century French music. Koechlin’s longevity, extraordinary productivity, eclecticism and reputation as theorist and teacher (Poulenc studied counterpoint and composition with him from 1921-1924) all have failed to rescue his music from oblivion. Few Twentieth-century figures in music, however, present as fascinating and subtle a subject for exploration and rediscovery. Les Bandar-Log is part of Koechlin’s nearly lifelong effort to set Kipling’s The Jungle Book to music. It was first sketched in 1923 and written out in 1939 and orchestrated in 1940. Subtitled “Scherzo of the Monkeys”, it is based on “Kaals Hunting” from Volume 1 of Kipling’s book. It was premiered in 1946 in Brussels and is perhaps Koechlin’s best known work. It was recorded by Antal Dorati in the mid 1960’s and used for a ballet by Anthony Tudor. This work shares with surrealism a sharp critical intent toward assumptions of the communication of meaning through sounds, images, and words. Koechlin utilizes nearly all the stylistic elements of twentieth-century musical modernism. Taking the idea of the monkeys making sounds in the forest as his premise, Koechlin attacked the delusions and arrogant claims of twelve-tone writing, neo-classicism, polytonality and atonality. It is as if Koechlin approached this work as a surrealist painter who generates the appearance of a narrative and who then inverts meanings, time and spatial relations for the viewer. Taking the ironic subject of the “primitive” monkey, Koechlin opens the work with a depiction of the “calm of the luminous morning”. This calm is interrupted by the “procedures of modern harmony”. The monkeys are vain and seek to display their “secrets”. They lurch from romanticism to neo-classicism and “pretend” to return to Bach. However within this satire “there is a genuine homage to polytonal language and even to atonality”. Koechlin toyed with different styles—photographic realism, impressionism, cubism—but in the end returned to his own virtuosic vocabulary. The orchestration is splendid. Out of distorted juxtapositions and a seemingly disjointed and allusive set of episodes comes a coherent musical reconfiguration. An underlying unity is revealed through disparate parts. Despite themselves, the monkeys manage to make the forest sing. Koechlin mixes illustration with transformation, through a sequence of musical images mediated by reaction of the listener and the plot of the score (e.g., how the monkeys act and finally flee the arrival of the lords of the jungle). Musical illustration and narrative are turned on their heads through the manipulation of the modernist strategies which depict human behavior as if humans were monkeys in a jungle. A dreamlike and almost cinematic effect is achieved. --Leon Botstein Art by Maurice and Edward Detmold