'Withdrawn' works which deserve to be heard

[vandermolen]

Rachmaninoff - Symphony No. 1

An excellent choice! Of course, it's my favourite of his symphonies!

[Cato]

Rachmaninoff - Symphony No. 1

I would nominate the original version of Rachmaninoff's Fourth Piano Concerto, which solves some of the abruptness here and there in the final revision.


On a Sibelius recording of some sort by Eugene Ormandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra, the conductor told of his visit to Sibelius in Finland in the 1950's.  Ormandy, of course, asked about the Symphony #8's status.

The daughter of the composer was there, and apparently during the composer's hesitation of what to answer, she urged her father: "Tell the man, Father."

Sibelius then said: "There will be no 8th Symphony," and Ormandy commented to the writer of the notes: "He seemed very relieved."

Yes, I have also read that brain damage from alcoholism and senility were probably involved in the inability of the composer to produce anything in his last decades.

[Pohjolas Daughter]

I take "withdrawn" to mean somewhere, somehow the work was pulled out of availability.  That might be because the creator of it rejected it or it was pulled by the publisher.  I'd also add in some cases the work was just lost and "withdrawn" from availability because it was destroyed or just lost.   

I was thinking more about the meaning of withdrawn and why some pieces of music are either never played/performed again (or at least not until after the composer has died)...and, yes, works can also be lost or accidentally destroyed or purposefully destroyed.  I'll be a bit of a Devil's advocate here by asking this question:  Is a work of music really a work of music if it hasn't been completed (according to the composer)? 

PD

[relm1]

I would nominate the original version of Rachmaninoff's Fourth Piano Concerto, which solves some of the abruptness here and there in the final revision.


On a Sibelius recording of some sort by Eugene Ormandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra, the conductor told of his visit to Sibelius in Finland in the 1950's.  Ormandy, of course, asked about the Symphony #8's status.

The daughter of the composer was there, and apparently during the composer's hesitation of what to answer, she urged her father: "Tell the man, Father."

Sibelius then said: "There will be no 8th Symphony," and Ormandy commented to the writer of the notes: "He seemed very relieved."

Yes, I have also read that brain damage from alcoholism and senility were probably involved in the inability of the composer to produce anything in his last decades.

Any recommendations of Rach's #4 original version? Curious to check it out as I'm a fan of his.  I read a bio of Sibelius and it paints a bleak picture of the man.  There was clearly something wrong with his mind and maybe the alcohol was self medication, but I still have hope that someday the No. 8 might surface because he did send copied scores to Koussevitzky meaning it probably went to a copyist to be prepared.  There just might be other copies out there.  Where things get tricky is most of these companies cease to exist or are absorbed in to other companies over the years and it's not always clear what they've inherited.  It might be sitting out there, and no one knows they have it.  It also opens up the very interesting question of when is it time as a great artist to hang up the phone.  Some composers, like RVW compose up to the very end with no diminution of talent.  I wonder if there are others who really should have quite decades earlier, and they might be better regarded by posterity.  Are there any examples of great composers who should have stopped composing decades before they did?  Maybe Markovich but don't know if he would count because he had a dual career as composer/conductor and then just focused on conducting. 

[Cato]

Any recommendations of Rach's #4 original version? Curious to check it out as I'm a fan of his. 
 

Try this:

Kent Nagano conducting the Montreal Symphony Orchestra with Alain Lefevre.

[Nunc Dimittis]

Lars Erik Larsson: Symphony No.2 (I think that he withdrew all three)

At one point BIS had recorded all three of Larsson's symphonies.  I clearly remember Capital Public Radio(Sacramento, CA) playing the Larsson No. 2 - primarily because they were playing anything by Larsson.

[Nunc Dimittis]

Any other suggestions?

Off the top of my head

Anything by Peter Mennin.  I know Symphonies 1 & 2 have been withdrawn, but there might be others. 

Anything by Allan Pettersson.

[Brian]

At one point BIS had recorded all three of Larsson's symphonies.  I clearly remember Capital Public Radio(Sacramento, CA) playing the Larsson No. 2 - primarily because they were playing anything by Larsson.

CPO has a full cycle now as well, with lots of other orchestral works as filler.

[ritter]

It would be great if the incidental music that Pierre Boulez composed for productions by Jean-Louis Barrault —L'Orestiade, Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra— were recovered. The score of first one seems to have been destroyed during the storming of the Théâtre de l'Odéon in May 68, though  .

[Pohjolas Daughter]

... but I still have hope that someday the No. 8 might surface because he did send copied scores to Koussevitzky meaning it probably went to a copyist to be prepared. 

Oh, interesting!  May I ask where you read that he had sent scores to Koussevitzky?  And by scores (plural), was he asking him for advice...as in which parts/versions he liked better?  This is news to me!  If so, maybe it (they?) will turn up in some of K's possessions?

PD

EDIT:  I just ran across this lengthy article.  According to it, it does not sound like he ever sent off any/all of it to Koussevitzky.  Quite interesting reading though.  https://relatedrocks.com/2015/05/13/sibeliuss-eighth-symphony-fact-and-fiction/

[Spotted Horses]

I think the granddaddy of all withdrawn works that should have been heard is Sibelius No. 8...NOT the fragments originally marketed as fragments from that work!  It would have been an hour long choral symphony...a perfect bookend to Kullervo and as Sibelius described it, the culmination of his life's work as a composer.

This is the first I have heard that it was a choral symphony. Source?

[vandermolen]

Any recommendations of Rach's #4 original version? Curious to check it out as I'm a fan of his.  I read a bio of Sibelius and it paints a bleak picture of the man.  There was clearly something wrong with his mind and maybe the alcohol was self medication, but I still have hope that someday the No. 8 might surface because he did send copied scores to Koussevitzky meaning it probably went to a copyist to be prepared.  There just might be other copies out there.  Where things get tricky is most of these companies cease to exist or are absorbed in to other companies over the years and it's not always clear what they've inherited.  It might be sitting out there, and no one knows they have it.  It also opens up the very interesting question of when is it time as a great artist to hang up the phone.  Some composers, like RVW compose up to the very end with no diminution of talent.  I wonder if there are others who really should have quite decades earlier, and they might be better regarded by posterity.  Are there any examples of great composers who should have stopped composing decades before they did?  Maybe Markovich but don't know if he would count because he had a dual career as composer/conductor and then just focused on conducting. 

Not sure about composers 'who should have stopped' but the sculptor Henry Moore comes to mind. He was a great sculptor but I think that his later work is vastly inferior to his work done in the 1940s and 50s for example. IMO the larger it got the weaker it was. There are a number of composers whose 1st symphonies (IMO of course) were superior to anything else they did but that might just be a comment on my more conservative taste.
Klaus Egge (although I've got to appreciate his 2nd Symphony) and Karl Birger Blomdahl come to mind. Also I prefer Lilburn's two earlier symphonies and Braga-Santos's symphonies 1-4 much more than 5 and 6. Roy Harris and David Diamond also come to mind.

[relm1]

Oh, interesting!  May I ask where you read that he had sent scores to Koussevitzky?  And by scores (plural), was he asking him for advice...as in which parts/versions he liked better?  This is news to me!  If so, maybe it (they?) will turn up in some of K's possessions?

PD

EDIT:  I just ran across this lengthy article.  According to it, it does not sound like he ever sent off any/all of it to Koussevitzky.  Quite interesting reading though.  https://relatedrocks.com/2015/05/13/sibeliuss-eighth-symphony-fact-and-fiction/

This article has some interesting details including the full score was being bound by the copyist.

There had been some interesting action that year, however, and we start getting some hints about how the work was taking shape. On September 4, a famous bill (still extant) from German musician Paul Voigt, Sibelius's copyist, for copying the first movement of the Eighth Symphony, indicates that he sent 23 pages of the score to Sibelius. Sibelius wrote back: "There should be a fermata at the end. The Largo continues directly. The whole work will be about eight times as long as this." Since slow movements usually take up fewer printed pages than fast ones, it would seem that the third movement was to be unusually lengthy, or that there were more than the three movements sometimes mentioned by Sibelius. There were subsequent meetings between Sibelius and Voigt that, according to witnesses, involved quantities of manuscript paper. Receipts also exist for large purchases of music paper in both 1933 and 1935.

Now we have to jump forward to 1938. A receipt from August indicates that a "Symphonie" was being bound. Curiously, the bill was for binding seven volumes. Sibelius was known not to have manuscripts of his seven numbered symphonies. On the other hand, it seems implausible that the Eighth Symphony would have been in seven separately bound movements. But no more is known. Some believe that he actually completed the Eighth that year, but kept it entirely to himself. Much later, in 1943, Sibelius mentioned to a couple of people that he was in the midst of some new work, which many scholars assume to be the Eighth.

[relm1]

This is the first I have heard that it was a choral symphony. Source?

Link in my previous post talks about it.  (where it says "article" is a link) and he's giving feedback to the copyist (stating a fermata should be at the end) indicating it was getting prepped and in the hands of the copyist. 

[Cato]

Concerning the original Piano Concerto #4 by Rachmaninoff:

Try this:

Kent Nagano conducting the Montreal Symphony Orchestra with Alain Lefevre.

Earlier I had the wrong YouTube link: all fixed!

[vandermolen]

Concerning the original Piano Concerto #4 by Rachmaninoff:

Earlier I had the wrong YouTube link: all fixed!

Marvellous! No.4 is my favourite.

[Spotted Horses]

Link in my previous post talks about it.  (where it says "article" is a link) and he's giving feedback to the copyist (stating a fermata should be at the end) indicating it was getting prepped and in the hands of the copyist. 

A shame that no one had the sense to put aside a copy. I read recently that Janacek destroyed his sonata 1.X.1905 (threw it in a river) but that the pianist who was tentatively going to give the premier performance kept a copy.

[relm1]

A shame that no one had the sense to put aside a copy. I read recently that Janacek destroyed his sonata 1.X.1905 (threw it in a river) but that the pianist who was tentatively going to give the premier performance kept a copy.

I think a more realistic scenario is no one knows they have a copy to set it aside.  This happens often!  People inherit stuff and don't know what it is.  The exact same thing happens to companies that are acquired.  Copyists that Sibelius used were most certainly acquired.  It is possible it is sitting unmarked in a box somewhere waiting to be discovered.  I think Shostakovich's lost opera, Orango, is a case study.  It was from his early radical period which some of us consider a very interesting period before the Pravda rebuke and the subsequent populist years.  It was found in boxes in 2004 but only a musicologist even knew this work existed and what the fragmented music could be.  There are many other scattered fragments in that same collection, but some are just sketches and some flushed out but eventually discarded ideas.  The problem is sometimes they use that material in unexpected ways or sometimes it is left over material from major works.  I remember when in grad school, a classmate doing research stumbled upon previously unknown handwritten music from the film composer, Bernard Herrmann, she was shaking that she found something no one else knew about...new Herrmann material.  No one knew what it was unless Herrmann had mentioned it.  He wasn't the most prolific composer but just an example of how common this is.  There are loads of aborted projects or embarrassing projects or sketches that might turn in to projects, etc.  That's why I'm critical that Sibelius' "Three Fragments" are part of his 8th symphony.  They are just sketches and ideas and don't match up to what he described his 8th to be.  They are just random thoughts any composer would have...part of a sketch pad.  Interesting from a historical and musicological point of view helping guide an understanding of what he was thinking at that time and not more. 

[Pohjolas Daughter]

I think that it's amazing how Casal's stumbling across an old copy of Bach's Suites for Solo Cello (which were barely known at the time and apparently weren't even published until 1825) and how that changed the popularity of the cello and composers writing for it:  https://www.cpr.org/2018/07/25/the-story-behind-the-bach-cello-suites-and-why-we-still-love-them-today/

PD

p.s. @relm1 , was that material by Bernard Herrmann ever performed?  Or was it more like sketches/ideas that he had jotted down?  Still, that must have been a cool find by her! 

[Madiel]

I take "withdrawn" to mean somewhere, somehow the work was pulled out of availability.

To be pulled out of availability, it must first have been available. Which Sibelius' 8th was not.