Listening to this selection of scores from one of 20th-century music’s also-rans, I was reminded of Diaghilev’s advice to the young Prokofiev – that he should learn to hate: ‘the cannon shoots far because it does not scatter its fire’. Alexander Tansman (1897-1986), a Polish-Jewish emigre who spent most of his composing life in Paris and the war years in Los Angeles, is like an over-ingratiating house guest who desperately wants to be liked. While his magpie idiom has been likened to a combination of Ravel and Stravinsky, the music here alludes to just about every influence current in the 1920s. The results are always eminently civilised and beautifully orchestrated, even if they seldom gel into a convincing whole.
Hence the Violin Concerto begins in mysterious Szymanowski-like shadows only to opt for anonymous passagework once the soloist enters. The sugary second subject demonstrates why Tansman might have found employment in Hollywood; it also explains why his efforts there won less renown than Korngold’s. As the movement continues, some of the faster passages recall Roussel, but there is a positively Brahmsian patch before the final flourish. (The composer also has a curious habit of shoe- horning in short-lived fugal episodes of indeterminate tonality.) The second movement opens a la orientale before amiable bustle takes over. The high-lying lyricism of the Adagio cantabile is attractive, though it cries out for the velvet sheen of a Shaham or a Perlman – the soloist here is taxed – while the high jinks of the finale might be more convincing without the stilted cadenza.
Of the remaining works on the programme, the Polish dances are lightweight, surprisingly bland, the Rhapsodie polonaise a little more ambitious. The Cinq pieces, on the other hand, strike a few sparks: several moments pre-empt rather than rip off the neo-classicism of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto; others are Korngold-lush. The Honegger-like Danse de la sorciere was composed as early as 1923. The booklet-notes imply that this display piece, derived from an abandoned Hans Christian Andersen ballet, is securely in the tradition of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Perhaps so, and yet it also contains some aggressive harmonic spicing that goes beyond what I take to be its model, Prokofiev’s Chout (or ‘The Buffoon’); this is by some way the most astringent item on the disc.
Undemanding fare in the main then, undeniably tuneful, decently played and agreeably recorded. It could have wide appeal.'