These days, getting little-known music recorded is a lot easier than it once was — and a lot more appealing to musicians. Now that it’s easier to make a recording than to play Carnegie Hall and the standard repertory has been recorded to death, more artists are staking out their own niches by championing and recording forgotten composers of past eras: the orchestral music of Alfredo Casella; the complete woodwind quintets of Antonin Reicha.
Making a CD has become tantamount to creating a business card: a self-generated form of self-validation. But for many of the musicians who have plunged into these unfamiliar scores and believe they’ve found treasure, the larger point is to make a mark on posterity. “I really believe in this music,” Woods says of Gal’s work. “I do believe it will enter the repertoire.”
There’s one hitch. Although more music is available on recordings, it sometimes seems that less of it is heard in live performance. This is certainly true in the orchestra world, which continues to rely heavily on Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, make occasional forays into contemporary music, and have little room for forgotten composers. So, while recordings offer a cornucopia of music the likes of which the world has never known, this wealth is not widely reflected in live concerts.
“It’s a long slog,” says Joseph Horowitz, the co-founder of Washington’s Post-Classical Ensemble who has long worked as a consultant, adviser, and programmer. Horowitz is an adviser to the “American Classics” series on the record label Naxos, devoted to composers like George Whitefield Chadwick (1854-1931) and George Templeton Strong (1856-1948). But he’s the first to admit that, for all the important rediscovery work the series has done, it’s barely caused a ripple in the American orchestral repertoire. Works like Chadwick’s engaging “Jubilee” or Strong’s “Sintram” symphony — “the only successful American symphony in the grand romantic mode,” Horowitz says — simply don’t get performed. “I think much more should have happened by now,” Horowitz says.
James Conlon, currently the music director of the Los Angeles Opera and the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, is one of the bigger-name conductors to devote himself to little-known repertory. His particular focus is the music of the so-called “degenerate composers” — artists who, like Gal, were proscribed by the Nazis. Conlon repeatedly performs operas and symphonic works by Alexander Zemlinsky, Viktor Ullmann, Franz Schreker and others; from artists like Gal who were in the midst of flourishing careers to young talents who were just getting started, like Gideon Klein, who was 26 when he died at Auschwitz. He’s established a foundation devoted to disseminating information about these artists; he makes a point of bringing the repertoire to young musicians; and he’s started initiatives like the concert series at Ravinia called “Breaking the Silence.” But even he — speaking by phone the morning after playing Schreker and Kurt Weill on a program at Ravinia — sometimes has trouble getting organizations to put it on.
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