Naxos' derivative imprint Marco Polo was rightly billed in the 1980s and '90s as "the label of discovery," and one of the most important discoveries it made was the long forgotten orchestral music of conductor
Igor Markevitch. Self-styled as the last discovery of impresario Sergei Diaghilev and married to the daughter of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky,
Markevitch continued the 1920s-era modernist style set forth by composers such as
Stravinsky,
Prokofiev, Honegger, and Varèse into the 1930s when
Stravinsky and
Prokofiev had moved into neo-classicism, Honegger into the movies, and Varèse into his long, self-imposed silence as a composer. Well before Varèse finally picked up the ball again,
Markevitch was trapped in a compositional silence of his own, one that would last the rest of his life.
Naxos has decided to migrate its Marco Polo
Markevitch series to the main catalog, and the Naxos release Igor Markevitch: Complete Orchestral Works, Vol. 2, was originally Volume 1 on Marco. It contains what may well be
Markevitch's most intense and personal orchestral statement, the symphonic poem Le Nouvel Age (1937). While not obviously a latter-day product of the Russian Futurist ethos -- already suppressed in the Soviet Union itself by 1937 -- the program devised for it by
Markevitch reveals that this is definitely so. Originally planned as a cantata with a text by surrealist poet and provocateur Edward James,
Markevitch was forced to scrap this concept when James attempted to make a move on
Markevitch's wife and was permanently ejected from the household. The influx of personal passions in the background of what was intended as a steely, mechanistic work --
Markevitch had no qualms with James over his actions, but Mrs. Markevitch was furious and the issue dragged on for months -- takes Le Nouvel Age to a new level. While it began as a sort of pantheistic paean to an imagined future -- it bears some surface resemblance to Varèse's Amèriques -- Le Nouvel Age ended up being a kind of sounding board for Kyra Markevitch's deep-seated sense of betrayal. Premiered in Warsaw in 1938, it was
Markevitch's greatest success as a composer, but with only a couple of notable exceptions, it appears the European music of the 1930s has largely been swept away by the currents of the unimaginably horrible history that followed.
The Sinfonietta in F (1929) is an early work dating from
Markevitch's association with Diaghilev and takes the form of a neo-classic work, but it isn't pithy or ingratiating; it's dark, intense, and dramatic. Likewise is the Cinéma-Ouverture (1931), written for a film starring Brigitte Helm that was never made;
Markevitch was fast friends with Sergei Eisenstein, though he turned down an offer to return to Russia to compose for Soviet cinema. It is rife with stubborn, repetitive cycles, and contains sounds of auto horns and sirens in one passage. To utilize terminology perhaps a step down from the usual classical reviewer's arsenal of adjectives, it's cool.
Conductor
Christopher Lyndon-Gee delivers this volatile mixture with a lot of punch; like a lot of Naxos recordings of this era, it's a little quieter than perhaps it should be, but is completely clear and you can hear everything fine; just crank it up. When this Naxos version of Igor Markevitch: Complete Orchestral Works, Vol. 2, appeared in August 2009, word arrived that David Drew -- the Boosey & Hawkes editor who encouraged
Markevitch at the end of the 1970s to empty out his cabinets and publish his modest output anew -- had passed away. The re-release of this disc, while not so marked, is a testament to Drew's good instincts and dedication to "lost" figures like
Igor Markevitch.