The music of Polish-born composer, Czeslaw Marek (1891-1986), serves up an intoxicating aural cocktail. Echoes of Wagner, Strauss and (more unexpectedly) Delius and Chausson permeate the earliest offering here, the Op. 14 Meditations. Composed during the years 1911-13 (when Marek was still a student in Vienna), each of its four movements contains plenty to seduce the ear. The most appealing invention can be found in the third movement “Elegie” (which boasts a pretty, very Delian principal melody), but overall it’s hardly gripping fare.
However, the two remaining items on this CD are a different matter altogether. Marek completed his five-movement Suite for orchestra in Zurich during the spring of 1926. (He had settled in Switzerland in 1915 and took out Swiss citizenship in 1932.) The decadent atmosphere of the Meditations has now been replaced by a crisp, clean-cut neo-classicism strikingly reminiscent of Busoni. Here is music which evinces the fastidious refinement of Ravel (the equivalent movement in Le Tombeau de Couperin clearly provided the model for Marek’s own enchanting “Prelude”, with its luminous, bubbling textures) and something of the dark-hued, restrained eloquence of Franz Schmidt (try the deeply felt second movement, a solemn, stately “Sarabande”). In the captivating third movement (entitled “Burla” or “a joke”), I even detected more than a whiff of the bracing mountain air of the late works of Marek’s better-known compatriot, Karol Szymanowski. The vigorous, good-humoured last two movements, “Gigue” and “Presto”, are perhaps rather more conventional (the latter could easily have been plucked from one of Bartok’s own early suites), but the work as a whole is a definite ‘find’.
Marek’s Op. 28 Sinfonia was one of the compositions short-listed for the top prize in the Columbia Graphophone Company’s Schubert Centenary competition of 1928 (other finalists included Havergal Brian’s Gothic Symphony, Franz Schmidt’s Third Symphony and – the eventual winner – Kurt Atterberg’s Sixth Symphony). Unlike its two modestly scored companions, the Sinfonia employs a vast orchestra, which includes five clarinets, six horns, four trumpets and five trombones. Although Marek himself referred to the piece in a publicity article as his Sinfonia brevis (“Short Symphony”), it actually clocks in at some 32 minutes! Cast in a single movement, it is an extraordinarily ambitious, headily scored creation (some of the more seismic climaxes would warrant a reading on the Richter scale), yet there are also many moments of the greatest delicacy. As in the Suite, there are marked elements of Polish folk-song material, and, again, the sounds produced are inevitably reminiscent of Szymanowski, though for all Marek’s considerable orchestral expertise, he perhaps lacks that master’s innate good taste.
In his extensive and enthusiastic booklet-notes Calum MacDonald makes bold claims for Marek’s Sinfonia: “Had [Marek] written nothing else, he would deserve to be ranked as an important twentieth-century composer, an orchestral master and a tonal thinker who made an original and distinctive contribution to the symphonic literature.” My own first impulse, I have to say, was to replay the piece immediately and a second hearing revealed a deceptively strong inner logic I had somehow missed first time round (unless I’m mistaken, all the material seems to derive from the slumbering idea first heard on the two bass clarinets at the very start). Anyway, I am certainly looking forward to grappling further with Marek’s Sinfonia over the weeks and months ahead.
In both the Suite and Sinfonia Gary Brain draws a splendidly alert response from the Philharmonia; perhaps, given playing of greater bite and concentration, the Meditations might have left a more enduring impression. The enticingly ripe recording captures Marek’s opulent sound-world with some aplomb (Watford Town Hall was the ideal venue). Intriguing stuff, then, and there’s more in the pipeline.'