Reger Gesang der Verklärten

[Alan Howe]

I was going to post this in the Senfter thread, but decided that the music deserved a thread of its own:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M-ckm7kgJk

It's gorgeous, isn't it? And it gives us an important context for the discussion of Senfter's music. Reger wrote this in 1903, well before Senfter entered Reger's composition class at the Leipzig Royal Conservatory in October 1908. The difference, I think, is that, while Reger's use of constantly evolving chromaticism here is very obvious, somehow he manages not to lose us 'in the sludge', as Dave Hurwitz would put it. And this - i.e. 'getting lost 'in the sludge' - is the difficulty I have with Senfter's orchestral music.

Clearly, I need help...

From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesang_der_Verkl%C3%A4rten

<<The work was first performed in Aachen on 18 January 1906 by the municipal choir and orchestra (Städtischer Gesangverein and Städtisches Orchester), conducted by Eberhard Schwickerath. A. von der Schleinitz reported in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik:

It is not enough to call Reger's Opus 71, the ink still wet on its pages, the strangest and weirdest thing that has ever resounded in notes. With its dauntless accumulation of huge masses of sound, its unbridled and randomly modulating counterpoint, its strange harmonies leaping over every commonly accepted connecting link and progression, its audacious agglomeration of ugly sounds rarely interrupted by melodic flow, and its difficulties for every participant, far exceeding anything known to date, it may well reach the outermost limit of musical expression altogether, just as it sometimes seems to be an absurd game played with musical forms by a master whose command of his craft borders on genius.>>

[John Boyer]

Oh my goodness!

David O. Selznick proudly presents...

SONG OF TRANSFIGURATION!

Starring Betty Davis, Frederic March, and Leslie Howard!

Costumes by Adrian!

Music by Erich Korngold Max Reger!
---

Wonderful stuff.  Do you know his cantata Die Nonnen, Op. 112?  I have the Horst Stein/Bamberg recording from Koch/Schwann and have adored it from first hearing.  Like the Serenade, Op. 95 and Sinfonietta, Op. 90, these works show that Reger could write things with broad appeal, where you weren't bogged down in aural sludge.

More like aural fudge, but I'll take it.

[Alan Howe]

So: Reger gets away with it, but his pupil Senfter is mired in the sludge?

Yes: I have 'Die Nonnen', but have never played it! It's in the big DG 12-CD box 'Max Reger: Orchestral Edition'. Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYbCXRjVpjU

More information here:
https://repertoire-explorer.musikmph.de/en/product/reger-max-31/

Glorious, glorious! What a composer!

[John Boyer]

Break it out and play it.  You won't regret it. (Of course, you'll need to break the shrink wrap...)

[Alan Howe]

Very remiss of me. The shrinkwrap had already been removed because I hadn't originally bought the set for the choral stuff. When will I ever learn?

This is the set, by the way:  https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/8430817--reger-orchestral-edition

Question: why do we have so many recordings of, say, Gurrelieder, and hardly any of Reger's choral works?

[Jonathan]

I also have this in a boxed set and have never listened to it...

[Alan Howe]

Please don't follow my example!

[tuatara442442]

After somewhat enjoyed Senfter's PC I returned to Reger PC Mov I (I don't have many problems with the latter two, especially the second one), and still can't quite stomach the latter.
I feel Senfter in her PC made chromaticism somewhat gorgeous, decorating it with occasional consonant "oasis", though surely not up to the grade of Scriabin or Szymanowski, and the slowish and meditative overall tempo helps, although there are tropes of "chromatic sludge" like a tritone step after a semitone step.
Reger in his Gesang de Verklärten exhibits his gorgeously chromatic mode,  but in his Mov I of PC he literally climbed up and down the chromatic scale. It is empty like the introduction/Melisande theme of Schoenberg's Pelleas. But Reger did it with so impetuous a tempo that it is not only boring but also endless.

[eschiss1]

"Crickets? I thought you said critics!"