Day 250
Skalkottas: The Sea
Iceland Symphony Orchestra
Byron Fidetzis
This was a real surprise. I knew that Skalkottas was a pupil of Schoenberg and had a reputation as a modernist so I was expecting a tough listen. But this was very different. It was a series of dance pieces (the work started out as a ballet) in an idiom which seemed to belong to the nationalist dances that one finds in Russian or Czech music. The music dates from 1948 but there was very little that couldn’t have been composed at least 50 years earlier. The music was pleasant enough and I could imagine it being a good accompaniment to dance tp, but on its own it didn’t make a great impression. I need to understand more about Skalkottas and how he seems to have had such a split musical personality.
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