For 40 years, from his mid-thirties onwards, Koechlin, when he wasn't day-dreaming about goddesses of the cinema screen, was obsessed with Kipling's two Jungle Books. This eventually materialized in a large canvas of four symphonic poems, preceded by three songs (with chorus) that he then orchestrated. The complete sequence, called The Jungle Book, appears for the first time on the present RCA disc: the Marco Polo contains only the orchestral works, which they offer in the order of Kipling's stories, while RCA stick to Koechlin's chronological order of composition. It will be noted that the inclusion of the Op. 18 songs necessitates spreading to two discs, each of only short duration (though priced as a single disc): nevertheless the first song, the lushly scored ''Seal lullaby'' (the only movement not sited in the Indian rain forest) is so seductively beautiful that it would be a pity to miss it, especially as well sung as it is by Iris Vermillion; but the siren-like wordless female chorus behind her (or that should be behind her) is too loud and too close. A similar fault, but worse, mars the third song, which is about Kala-Nag's longing for the wild, with an orchestral interlude representing the secret annual dance of the elephants (those who remember the film Elephant Boy will know about this): Johan Botha totally disregards the repeated signs of pp and ppp and belts out everything like a Heldentenor, and his faulty French vowels made me squirm.
Of the symphonic poems, only The Bandar-Log is at all known here. The title refers to the noisy, empty-headed race of monkeys—''self-satisfied mimics whose only goal is to follow the fashions of the day''—which gives Koechlin an opportunity to pillory parallelism, dodecaphony and the sterile 'Back to Bach' movement then topical (in a fugato with each voice in a different key), all in a dazzlingly virtuoso piece of scoring for a huge orchestra. Our choice is between the more diffused sound of the 1985 Segerstam performance, which has a wonderfully atmospheric opening, and the 1993 Zinman, which is much clearer in detail and more vivid in the extrovert sections. Both orchestras rise fully to the occasion. The law of the jungle, in which Baloo the bear outlines to Mowgli the law of respect for precedence, seniority and tradition, ''recited in a sort of singsong'', forms the greatest possible contrast, austerely consisting entirely of short monodic phrases, mostly for wind.
The miracle of Purun Baghat (written in 1936 after Koechlin had discarded two earlier drafts in 1900 and 1923) is in essence a set of variations on a solemn unaccompanied melodic line (once again), depicting the powerful politician turned ascetic hermit: a long intensification to a big climax and an equally long descent into tranquillity illustrate the holy man, alerted by his animal friends, saving a village from a catastrophic landslide, his death and his subsequent veneration by the villagers. Some superiority by the Berlin Radio orchestra, aided by recording of more immediacy, makes itself felt here, but there is a greater sense of atmosphere and tense building to the climax in the Rheinland-Pfalz version. Much the longest of the orchestral pieces is The spring running, another virtuoso score, which falls into four sections—mysticism as spring slowly stirs in the forest, Mowgli's urge finally to leave the animal companions with whom he has lived and return to mankind, the painful following of unsettling ''new trails'' and ''time of new talk'' (another metaphor for the world of musical composition), and night falling again (mainly an immensely long monodic line over a pedal-note). Here the violins of the Berlin Radio orchestra are more sure-footed in stratospheric regions than their rivals, the organ that is introduced is of better sonority, and there is more brilliance of sound generally.
It is a pity that these two issues had to emerge at the same time: both have much to commend them. One way or another, however, do not miss these remarkable scores, which reveal a distinctly individual and boldly forward-looking mind with a wide stylistic vocabulary (generally atonal), great dramatic sense and a stunning technical command. That Koechlin has remained so little known and so little played for so long does him a conspicuous injustice.'