Fitful though they have been, Chandos’s issues devoted to the works of Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) have been especially welcome for their excellence of production. Thus far Chandos have featured four of his 16 symphonies and a tone-poem, conducted by Jarvi and Segerstam (12/92). Now, with Rozhdestvensky at the helm, they have turned to what is probably this composer’s most important – certainly most original – work, Music of the Spheres (1916-18). So radical did its sonic experiments seem even in the late-1960s that Ligeti no less, when inspecting the score, quipped that he had merely been a “Langgaard imitator” all along. The manipulation of blocks of sound rather than conventional thematic development does have much in common with trends in post-Second World War avant-garde composition (though stemming from impressionism), but other contemporaries of Langgaard’s, such as Schoenberg and Scriabin, had traversed similar terrain at least in part. The main difference between Langgaard and Ligeti lies in the former’s reliance on a fundamentally tonal language, however eccentrically deployed, and Music of the Spheres seems in hindsight to be a bridge between two other highly virtuosic scores with celestial connotations: Holst’s The Planets and Ligeti’s Atmospheres. The Tone Pictures (1917) were written alongside this extraordinary work, yet possess none of its stature: four charming songs, they seem effusive and outmoded by comparison.
Fine as John Frandsen’s pioneering account of Music of the Spheres still is, this newcomer is a markedly better all-round version. As interpretations both have much to offer, the principal differences being ones of internal balance. But the playing of the Danish orchestra for Chandos has gained much in fluency and security over that in 1980 (though admittedly the latter was for a public performance), and Chandos’s sound is of demonstration quality. This really is a disc you should hear.'