Tunes From the Darker Side

By Michael Walsh

Like children listening to a favorite bedtime story, classical audiences love to hear the same works over and over, and most of the time the record companies give them what they want: Bach Brandenburgs without end, Beethoven symphonies without number. Occasionally, however, a darker side surfaces, and . something different is unearthed: arcana by a famous composer, perhaps, or a new piece by a living artist that seeks to reveal the skull beneath the skin. A trio of recent releases for the adventurous shows the eerie attractions of mood music:

Debussy: The Fall of the House of Usher; Andre Caplet: Conte Fantastique (for harp and strings); Florent Schmitt: Etude pour "Le Palais Hante." (Georges Pretre conducting the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra; Angel.) Thanks to the translations of Baudelaire and Mallarme, the works of Edgar Allan Poe became popular in France during the late 19th century. Inevitably, they cast their spell on the imaginations of the country's leading composers; Debussy, for example, long considered writing a pair of one-act operas based on Poe's fantasies. He made a start on The Fall of the House of Usher, preparing the libretto himself, but at his death he had composed only the first scene and fragments of the second.

In 1976 Chilean Composer and Musicologist Juan Allende-Blin reconstructed and orchestrated about 400 bars of the opera. Debussy's brooding music is spheres apart from the pastoral beauties of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun or the nautical tone painting of La Mer. Indeed, in its consummate wedding of text to music, the work Usher most closely resembles is Debussy's only completed opera, the shadowy symbolist drama Pelleas et Melisande. The tormented Roderick Usher, Poe's unhappy protagonist, is depicted in agonized music that is drenched by the misery in the man's soul. Debussy intended Usher to last about an hour; Allende-Blin's realization runs a little more than 22 tantalizing minutes. What a pity that there is not more.

The other two works on the album also evoke Poe's haunted world. Conte Fantastique, a piquant harp concerto by Debussy's acolyte Andre Caplet, is based on the short story The Masque of the Red Death, and Schmitt's orchestral tone poem draws its inspiration from the poem "The Haunted Palace." Pretre gives each work a suitably atmospheric reading, emphasizing Debussy's gloom, Caplet's lightness and Schmitt's vigor.

George Crumb: A Haunted Landscape; William Schuman: Three Colloquies for Horn and Orchestra. (New York Philharmonic, Arthur Weisberg, conductor (of the Crumb); Zubin Mehta, conductor (Schuman), with Philip Myers, horn; New World Records.) Blessed with one of the most remarkable ears for sonority of any modern composer, Crumb has long had a fascination with the otherworldly. In such works as Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death, the two piano suites of Makrokosmos and the string quartet Black Angels, he combines a distinctive, flamboyant sense of instrumental color with a darkling imagination that results in some chillingly effective music. A Haunted Landscape employs an amplified piano and an exotic battery of more than 45 different percussion instruments to paint a vibrant picture of a ghostly landscape, whose desolation is heightened by a recurring set of string triads that float eerily by. One of the most startling of the new orchestral scores, A Haunted Landscape was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered last year.

Less stimulating is Schuman's Three Colloquies, a Philharmonic commission from 1980. A tired essay in Schuman's '50s style, the piece is only occasionally brightened by some pretty noises and adept writing for the solo instrument. Perhaps in response, Mehta turns in a slack reading, greatly in contrast to Weisberg's electric way with the Crumb.

Liszt: A Faust Symphony; Two Episodes from Lenau's "Faust." (James Conlon conducting the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, with John Aler, tenor, and the men's chorus of the Slovak Philharmonic; Erato.) In the Faust legend, the romantics found all the excesses they craved: sex, violence, power, the diabolical, damnation and salvation. And in Franz Liszt, who had more than a whiff of the necromancer about him, the Faust story found an ideal musical interpreter. In works such as Malediction and Totentanz for piano and orchestra, the four Mephisto Waltzes for solo piano and, most ambitious of all, the Faust Symphony, the great piano virtuoso gave free rein to his bursting creativity, conjuring up demonic worlds through his pianistic and compositional sorcery.

Despite Liszt's formidable reputation, the Faust Symphony, based on Goethe's poem, has never really entered the repertoire. Its high quotient of bombast, so attractive to the romantics, has fallen out of favor today, and its length (more than 70 minutes) can seem excessive. Still, Liszt's symphony, whose three movements depict Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles, ought to rate high, not only for its often startling pictorialism, but for its technical skill as well. Conlon and his forces give it a vibrant reading.

Liszt tapped another fervid source of the legend in two episodes of Faust by the mad Hungarian poet Nikolaus Lenau, who wrote his own treatment of the demoniac tale. Nocturnal Procession, a stately, spooky march of Gregorian- chanting penitents, is one of the composer's most original and beautiful creations. The Dance in the Village Inn, better known as the First Mephisto Waltz, sweeps forward with a cloven-hoofed fiddler calling the tune.