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IBERT: Ballad of Reading Gaol; Bacchanale; Louisville Concerto; HONEGGER: Prelude for Aglavaine & Selysette; Suite Archaique Louisville Orchestra/ Robert Whitney, Jorge Mester--First Edition 1906--67 minutes
Jacques Ibert's Ballade of Reading Gaol (1922) is based on the eponymous poem by Oscar Wilde. The subject, in Eugene Enrico's words, is "the horrors of prison life ... as a metaphor of the universal predicament of all mankind". I depicts the tedium of the prisoner marching through the yard, haunted with guilt over killing what he loved. A good part of this murky, often quiet music sounds like Miklos Rozsa's later anxiety-ridden score to Double Indemnity, with bits of Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe interspersed. II shows the mental anguish the prisoner must hold in. It opens nervously in the high strings over pizzicato basses, adds a doom-laden processional melody, and the two combine in a way that blends the earlier anxiety of Rozsa with Saint Saens's Danse Macabre. The movement scurries to a frenetic ending before the low strings create a bridge into III, a Debussian world, first of ghostly uncertainty and then quiet resignation.
Bacchanale opens with a combination of Khachaturian's Sabre Dance and Paul Creston. A broad, treading mid-section depicting the arrival of a major personage interrupts the proceedings, but as soon as the bigwig is settled the festivities resume to combine the two musical ideas.
Ibert wrote Louisville Concerto for the Louisville Orchestra. In the composer's words, "Pretty girls go by, horsemen gallop past. The orchestra pours out the warmth of the whisky, whilst a whiff of dream suddenly floats by." For all the references to horsemen, this jazzy pastiche of Offenbach, Grofe, and especially Gershwin comes off more as "A Frenchman in Louisville".
Arthur Honegger's Prelude for Aglavaine and Selysette (1917), a drama by Maeterlinck, was his first orchestral piece. It is a quiet, beautiful work that draws heavily on Debussy's Images and Jeux, though the young Honegger was more direct and ...