Surprisingly, given the critical acclaim he has often received, this is the first CD to be devoted to the orchestral music of Nikos Skalkottas, a contemporary of Tippett who died almost 50 years ago. From his earliest works, a personal idiom was evident, combining European modernism with the rhythmic dynamism of Greek traditional music, and characterized by a tensile strength and translucency of sound.
Like Bartok, Skalkottas wrote ‘popular’ music without compromise. The Greek Dances are ideal encore pieces, not least in these suave arrangements for strings. The Violin Concerto of 1937 is among his major works, with a solo part that is demanding yet integral to the symphonic nature of the score – something that Georgios Demertzis’s vital account readily conveys. While Schoenberg’s influence is apparent in the linear nature of the writing, a more telling comparison is with the similarly neglected concerto by Gerhard, for the way in which note-rows are transformed into melodic ideas of subtlety and flexibility. The close of the Andante has true lyrical repose, before the finale provides fireworks as well as clinching the musical design.
The Largo Sinfonico, completed in 1944, embodies some of Skalkottas’s most personal music; its 26-minute span is a seamless fusion of variation and sonata forms, as satisfying formally as emotionally. Nikos Christodoulou’s notes speak of a private musical universe, yet the plangency of the cello theme (from 4'29'') and the remorseless tread of the central climaxes betray an unease surely inseparable from the time of composition. The final bars, with the thematic material recast as a series of unearthly chords, feel as much a stoic acceptance of reality as they are a ‘harmony of the spheres’. With the Malmo orchestra fully attuned to the idiom, Christodoulou’s powerfully shaped reading makes for a compelling experience.
The Agora CD features a vibrant, if sometimes rough performance of Skalkottas’s Ten Musical Sketches, which distil his idiom in miniature. Yorgos Sicilianos’s Metamorphoses sound almost polite in comparison, but his Piano Concerto has an engaging astringency. Worth acquiring, but the spaciously recorded BIS disc is an essential purchase for anyone interested in twentieth-century music of style and substance.'