Dimitrie Cuclin (1885-1978)

[A Nyholm]

Thank you very much for all the fine material uploaded here!
I have been enjoying music by Nicodé and Kaun, among others.

Does anyone have any orchestral music by Dimitrie Cuclin (1885-1978) to upload?

Thanks.

/Anders

[lechner1110]

  Hi Anders

  I have symphony no.11 of Cuclin.
  I uploaded it Romanian music thread now.
  Please wait a moment.
  I wish you will enjoy it.

  All best
  A.S

[eschiss1]

the movements so far as I know them of symphony 11 by Cuclin are - well, just that the first movement and finale are both Allegro vivo, and that the second movement and third movement are clearly the scherzo and slow movement

I have a broadcast tape of his also quite fine and memorable symphony 9 (A minor) somewhere but my digitized version of it is in one track, I am not sure if I have Mac software to subdivide that anywhere, but will see if I can do so, set up an account and upload that as I do keep saying I shall.

[Sicmu]

 I have his Symphony No.13, I will post it next time.

[Holger]

I have a broadcast tape of his also quite fine and memorable symphony 9 (A minor) somewhere but my digitized version of it is in one track, I am not sure if I have Mac software to subdivide that anywhere, but will see if I can do so, set up an account and upload that as I do keep saying I shall.

In my view (but others may have different opinions on that) it's not really necessary to subdivide a piece into different sections, my own LP transfers almost all consist of one track only (sometimes even with merging two sides) – I rather do the splitting work when burning them on CD via Nero.

According to Mike Herman's splendid discographies, there is one further Cuclin symphony which has appeared on LP, it's No. 16, but I have not come across this LP so far.
http://www.musicweb-international.com/Balkan_discography/ECE_Balkan_Symphonies1.htm

Regards,
Holger

[eschiss1]

... it may well be necessary from my end of things...
Cuclin symphonies on LP included to my knowledge 11 in A-flat minor, 13 in F (1980s LP?), maybe 16 also, don't know. A brief choral work has appeared on a CD according to Worldcat (not, I think, the same scherzo for chorus that seems to have, also according to Worldcat, appeared on an LP.) The only works of his I've heard so far are syms. 9 and 11, though I have seen sym. 14 in E minor in score. (If one searches for "Cuclin" on Worldcat one will come across a misleading claim that a CD of Cuclin's music has been released. Trace this back to its source and one finds that this is a miscataloguing of a University of British Columbia Library LP- many of their LPs show up in Worldcat as CDs for some reason. Caveat, there.)

[A Nyholm]

Most enjoyable! Cuclin is an interesting composer to get to know. Thanks for sharing.

/Anders

[eschiss1]

Symphony 13- thanks!

[doctorpresume]

A vote of thanks for Cuclin's 9th, which I downloaded after chancing upon this site last week - been after it for a while now.

I listened through it on Friday night at the tail end of last week, and thoroughly enjoyed it (in spite of a fair poor performance in the recording, which is about as under-rehearsed as the two Cuclin LPs I've managed to get hold of - 11 & 13). So, on Saturday, I decided to have a sit down and listen to the second movement with the score in front of me - I've had the score for 12 months, and the first hearing of the symphony on Friday pointed towards the second movement as my initial favourite.

Completely shocked, then, to discover that the recording has been made from a VERY heavily edited version of the score!  There are at least two fairly chunky cuts, though I've only had time to definitively identify the first of these... The second movement starts on page 83, and at 21m21s on the single mp3 recording, it reaches "five bars before figure 21" on page 132. The melodic line continues uninterrupted, but digging through the score, I can identify the continuation of the melody as occuring at "11 bars before figure 36" on page 173. Some 41 pages. I reckon that's a cut of about 8 minutes of music. There's certainly another cut later in the movement too (though not as much). If there's anything like a similar approach in the other movements, an "uncut" 9th would seemingly be a fairly massive work approaching Mahlerian proportions. A very rough estimate based on bar count and approximate tempi when I got the score suggested the whole work should be something in the 55 to 60 minute region, so the 40-ish minutes of the version posted here would suggest that it's probably been chopped up quite a lot. Which also leads me to wonder if the 11th and 13th are particularly "complete" either... Nice to hear any of the 9th, of course, but knowing it's incomplete is a huge disappointment.

[eschiss1]

Wasn't aware of this re the 9th (I've only so far seen a score of one of Cuclin's works, a symphony in E minor and not recorded to my knowledge in any form to date - no.14? )
Thank you. (I am of two minds or so re cuts, having great respect for composer-authorized ones as having a purpose especially when they are as well-constructed, and meant to create a still-functioning work, as Liszt's seem to have been, for example, but am not offhand given to suspect that this was authorized by the composer. Might have been, it's true; I need to learn enough of more languages so that I could read what -is- available about Cuclin and others of my interest rather than waiting for dribs and drabs to make it to the few languages I do know a little of- I digress. Thank you again.)

[Latvian]

Thank you, Doctorpresume, for this information! I had read something to that effect somewhere in the past, but your note was the first I'd heard the cuts were so drastic and extensive. I'll be curious to learn more, if anyone is able to provide additional background.

[doctorpresume]

I should have a bit of time to do a bit more work on the score at the weekend, so I'll try and draw up a complete list of the cuts!

[doctorpresume]

Right, this is quite an epic post, because there's a lot to list (and if some of the information doesn't quite tally up with my original identification of the first cut in the second movement, it's probably because I didn't have time to take care over my notes first time round!  ).

Anyway, I've spent most of today poring over the score for Cuclin's 9th symphony, and I can report the full extent of the cuts made to the score as used in the recording posted on this forum. The timecodes I use refer to the single track of the complete symphony, I haven't split the recording down into separate tracks for each movement...

1st movement (pages 7 to 82 of the published score):
1: at 4m26s, at six bars after figure 9 (on page 27), the recording jumps to figure 16 (page 42). This amounts to a cut of 57 bars.
2: at 9m29s, at figure 27 (page 65), it jumps to figure 30 (page 76). This amounts to a cut of 29 bars.
The complete movement runs to 340 bars, of which only 254 have been recorded. The duration of those 254 bars comes to 11m03s. Assuming the average tempo of the missing bars to be the same as those recorded, an approximate duration of the whole movement would be 14m48s.

2nd movement (pages 83 to 219):
1: at 21m29s, at six bars before figure 21 (page 132), it jumps to eleven bars before figure 36 (page 175). This amounts to a cut of 276 bars (!).
2: at 22m49s, at figure 39 (page 184), it jumps to figure 49 (page 212). This amounts to a cut of 159 bars.
The complete movement runs to 965 bars, of which only 530 have been recorded. The duration of those 530 bars comes to 12m40s. Assuming the average tempo of the missing bars to be the same as those recorded, an approximate duration of the whole movement would be 23m04s.

3rd movement (pages 220 to 283):
Now, this one gets a bit messy!
1: at 26m12s, at figure 2 (page 223) it jumps to figure 4 (page 225). This amounts to a cut of 40 bars.
2: at 27m57s, at three bars after figure 5 (page 226), it jumps to ten bars after figure 5 (page 226). This amounts to a cut of 7 bars (I dunno, they make a 276 bar cut in the 2nd movement and then a 7 bar cut here – weird!).
3: at 29m21s, at one bar before figure 6 (page 229), it jumps to.... Well, this is where it gets messy!At this point, there are only 54 seconds of the movement left on the recording, and yet somehow, we're only at the top of page 229, and the movement still has another 54 pages to go! Trying to work out what's what in the remainder of the movement was beyond me – I can spot fragments here and there, but the parallel material doesn't match at all. It looks like pretty much the whole of the movement on the recording has been a massive cut-and-paste job whacked together from fragments of the score somehow made to fit together. At least it all seems to get back together in time for the closing seven or eight bars, though.
Anyway, the complete movement runs to 390 bars. Up to the cut at 29m21s, we've had 143 bars of score, of which only 96 bars have been recorded. Assuming the average tempo of the missing bars to be the same as those recorded (and this is likely to be more inaccurate than the earlier estimates!), an approximate duration of the whole movement would be 22m24s.

4th movement (page 284 to 415):
1: at 34m20s, at figure 9 (page 306), it jumps to eight bars after figure 9 (page 309). This, obviously, amounts to a cut of 8 bars.
2: at 35m12s, at figure 11 (page 312), it jumps to figure 13 (page 315). This amounts to a cut of 17 bars.
3: at 36m15s, at figure 15 (page 318), it jumps to figure 30 (page 369). This amounts to a cut of 312 bars.
4: at 37m25s, at figure 31 (page 373), it jumps to figure 38 (page 390). This amounts to a cut of 157 bars.
5: at 37m58s, at figure 40 (page 395), it jumps to figure 42 (page 399). This amounts to a cut of 26 bars. And that's the final cut, the remaining sixteen pages of the score play out intact!
The complete movement runs to 888 bars, of which only 368 have been recorded. The duration of those 368 bars comes to 9m26s. Assuming the average tempo of the missing bars to be the same as those recorded, an approximate duration of the whole movement would be 22m45s.

If we tot up those durations, an estimate for the duration of the uncut symphony comes out at 83 minutes, which really is quite a difference from the recording as we have it at just a few seconds shy of 40 minutes! Of course, I wouldn't necessarily take that estimate as a particularly accurate estimate, but treated as a ball-park figure it's a good guide to the extreme cuts that have been made.

Hope that information is interesting (it was a fascinating exercise to compile it all!), and of course let's hope that one day we'll get to hear the full 83 minute epic!

All the best.

Doctor P.

[TerraEpon]

Damn, haven't seen that level of sheering outside of Gliere's 3rd....

[Latvian]

Fascinating!

Thank you for your musicological efforts, Doctor P!