"Langgaard was nothing if not prolific. There are some 400 works in all. Regarded as eccentric during his lifetime (1893-1952), his music underwent neglect after some initial success and then enjoyed a posthumous vogue in the late 1960s. He has been hailed as a Danish Charles Ives or Havergal Brian, a comparison that is by no means inapt. These are very persuasive and sympathetic performances and very good recordings, but what of the music itself? For all his eclecticism his music exhibits some real qualities of imagination, vision even, alongside moments of conventional post-romantic rhetoric, yet there is no real symphonic coherence and little sense of 'Meisterschaft'. Those looking for the kind of musical nourishment and depthand above all, sheer musical concentration you find in Nielsen and other Scandinavian masters will look here in vain. But this is not to deny that there are many things in all three symphonies to interest and stimulate, alongside much that is overblown." (Robert Layton, Gramophone)
Rud Immanuel (Rued) Langgaard (1893-1952) was een Deense componist en organist. Doordat zijn muziek nogal afweek van wat gebruikelijk was in de Scandinavische muziek, werd hij pas jaren na zijn dood erkend als een van de interessantste en eigenzinnigste figuren in het Deense muziekleven. Hij was sinds 1926 gehuwd met Constance Olivia Tetens. (...) Hij schreef veel voor symfonieorkest, waaronder 16 symfonieën, en kon uitstekend orkestreren. Al deze symfonieën hebben een titel die de thematiek duidelijk moet maken. Omdat hij zich durfde los te maken van de klassieke vormleer, maken veel werken (zoals Sfærernes musik) een experimentele, pionierende indruk, al doorbrak hij nooit de tonaliteit. Hij liet ook satirische elementen in zijn werken toe. Zo schreef hij een koorwerkje waarin de frase "Carl Nielsen, onze grote componist" eindeloos werd herhaald. Naarmate hij ouder werd, werd zijn componeren steeds behoudender en daarom zijn de vroege symfonieën interessanter dan de latere.
"Rued Langgaard (18931952) was an odd, lonely figure in Danish music. His 16 symphonies make up a thought-provoking, original contribution to the history of the symphony - on the borderline between Romantic idealism and beauty on the one hand and the doubt, fragmentation and absuridty of the modern world on the other. The works on this CD show the sudden rupture in Langgaard's music between Sympony No. 6, a major Expressionistic work in Danish music, and its two extremely retrospective successors, which are the composer's demonstrative counterblast to the Neoclassical trend of the 1920s."
"Langgaards First Sonata is the product of four intensive days of composition at a sanatorium in Scania. This work virtually defines the stormy triumphant romanticism of youth. It is a work of lightning-strike violence raptly caught up in the legacies of Grieg and Brahms. (...) The single movement Second Sonata is spare by comparison, strange and challenging, built around a hymn-like tune. The tonality drifts pleasantly but drifts nonetheless. Oh there are touches of the old Brahmsian manner but other impressionistic and dissonant fires play through and over this music. (...) The two artists here struck me as utterly committed and highly sympathetic to Langgaard's idiosyncratic muse. If you enjoy the driftways between melody and dissonance then do not miss this first salvo in a new Dacapo series." (Musicweb)
The sound of Rued Langgaard's music is unique and undefinable. His late violin sonatas were written in the mid-twentieth century, and look both forward and back. With their intimacy and sense of longing, the sonatas have a nostalgic character, yet Rued Langgaard was more than just a very late Late Romantic who cultivated musical peculiarities and moods from a bygone age; he was a profoundly original composer whose musical ideas and visionary music remain something unique today. Dacapo's new CD with Langgaard's late violin sonatas outstandingly demonstrates Rued Langgaard's radical originality. On the face of it the music can sound like Romantic pastiche, but one should not be fooled: Langgaard constantly bends and stretches the old forms and creates new interrelationships. One of the four sonatas, the Short Violin Sonata, has concentration of the musical material at its centre. Other sonatas show Langgaard's strongly religious, imagery-creating side.
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