While Rued Langgaard never improved as a composer, at least he wrote slightly shorter symphonies, so that counts for something. After nearly an hour of bombastic banalities in his five-movement Symphony No. 1 "Rock Pastorals," Langgaard managed to condense his thought -- if that's not too strong a word for it -- into less than 20 minutes of ineluctable imbecilities in his single-movement Symphony No. 5 "Summer Legend's Drama." His Symphony No. 7 "By Tordenskjold in Holmen's Church" also takes less than 20 minutes and is in ...
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While Rued Langgaard never improved as a composer, at least he wrote slightly shorter symphonies, so that counts for something. After nearly an hour of bombastic banalities in his five-movement Symphony No. 1 "Rock Pastorals," Langgaard managed to condense his thought -- if that's not too strong a word for it -- into less than 20 minutes of ineluctable imbecilities in his single-movement Symphony No. 5 "Summer Legend's Drama." His Symphony No. 7 "By Tordenskjold in Holmen's Church" also takes less than 20 minutes and is in four movements, but its pious sentimentalities are just as unendurable as Symphony No. 5's insipid inanities. And although the four-movement Symphony No. 9 "From the Town of Queen Dagmar" takes a bit longer than symphonies No. 5 and No. 7, it's still every bit as bad, plus, coming from the middle of the twentieth century, it has the added disadvantage of being grotesquely antique.One cannot fault this 1991 recording by Ilya Stupel and the Artur Rubinstein Philharmonic Orchestra....
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