As Marco Polo’s richly rewarding survey of his orchestral music (of which this is Vol. 4 – previous volumes were reviewed in A/97 and 1/98) has been demonstrating that Igor Markevitch was a composer of real importance, so the big question about him has been growing ever bigger: why, after ten years of almost uninterrupted success and the warm admiration of Bartok, Cortot, Stravinsky, Milhaud and many others, did he stop composing while still in his twenties?
There may be an answer in this absorbing coupling. Psaume (in fact a four-movement setting of several psalm texts, in French, very much paraphrased and rearranged by the composer) is what anyone who has heard any of the earlier discs in this series will recognize as typical Markevitch; it dates from 1923, when he was 21. He sees the psalms not as other-worldly or pious canticles but as wild tribal ritual chants, most vividly in the third movement where an incessant, barbaric ostinato is gradually intensified to a pile-driving polyrhythmic structure, the soprano soloist reinforced (out of necessity, no doubt, but it is effective as well) by a small choir of sopranos who gradually reduce the text of Psalm 148 to repeated cries of “Praise Him! Praise Him!”. It is all the more effective for being preceded by an exceptionally bare slow movement (flute and soprano alone for several pages) in which bleak phrases of supplication decline first to monotone, then to guttural speech. The first movement prefigures the third, to a degree (which is why, no doubt, the boos at its first performance began when the music had hardly started); you could describe the finale as a pastoral ostinato with rapt soprano phrases above. Effective and gripping; you might term it ‘The Rite of Praise’.
Lorenzo il Magnifico comes from seven years later, and is Markevitch’s last work for orchestra. It is far richer in sound than Psaume, often more lyrical but still strong, with ostinato remaining an important element. In the finale this takes the form of a heavy-footed dance rhythm (the accompanying notes speak, quite inexplicably, of a “gossamer-light gigue”) which, together with Markevitch’s awkward setting of Italian and a melodic impoverishment bordering on banality, is a quite unworthy response to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s gracious texts. The old Markevitch is heard, briefly but most effectively, when Lorenzo’s most famous words (“Quant’e bella giovinezza ...”) are set as a threnody, over a subdued, threatening rhythm. The earlier fast movements are stronger, especially the fourth, but the central, slow “Contemplation of beauty” for strings alone is disconcerting: a Mahlerian adagietto, but an aimless one and, again, thematically undistinguished.
Did Markevitch give up composing, in short, because he was burnt out? The question would not be worth asking if this series, not least Psaume and some pages even of Lorenzo il Magnifico, had not demonstrated him to be, if only for a decade or so, a composer of rare, individual and vivid gifts. The performances, as before, are thoroughly reliable (it is not Lucy Shelton’s fault that she sounds uncomfortable in the Italian settings), as is the recording.'