Stunning for me.Hardly someone here in Romania remembers Cuclin...
But then, isn't the "arts college" in Cuclin's home town of Galati named after him? I don't think educational establishments tend to get named after people no-one regards as worthy of being remembered, or even who were
persona non grata in the eyes of the state.
If anything, I suspect Cuclin's apparent obscurity is mostly down to a sort of "wrong place wrong time" situation. Let's be honest, his music is a tad conservative (I don't mean that as a criticism!), and if we consider the case of Kabalevsky in relation to Shostakovich, perhaps that might go some way to explaining why Cuclin has fallen out of favour. Also, I suspect, the apparent lack of availabilty of scores might have something to do with it. When I first encountered Cuclin's name a little over 18 months ago, I did a whole heap of research on him, and could only find evidence of the physical existence of a mere handful of scores in libraries around the world (well, lbraries with a web presence, at least!). Even the USA's Library of Congress database (the world's biggest library) only had two or three references to him; and a work colleague's partner was recently in Romania on business and I asked him to see if he could find any scores in Romania, and he returned empty handed. In some ways, that absence of scores is not dissimilar from the position Sorabji's music was in some 30 years ago (a handful of published scores that started to finally sell out after 40 or 50 years in print as an ironic consequence of a growing interest in his music), except unlike Sorabji, Cuclin hasn't yet acquired any indefatigable champions to doggedly work on his music in spite of a general lack of commercial interest. If Cuclin had people like Ogdon, Powell, Ullen and Bowyer striving to make his music better known, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now!
Unfortunately, we don't, and all we've currently got are the old Electrecord records, which really aren't very good. Enough of the quality of the music shines out, I think, to show it's worth exploring, but the sound quality and the performances are terrible. Particularly in the 13th, which I think is one of the worst performances of any work committed to vinyl I've ever come across. I respectfully disagree with Malito about it being a boring work - I think it sounds like it's got potential, but that record is simply terrible, and doesn't really allow for a fair assessment of the work.
Anyway, thanks for Malito and AS for making the 16th available - about to download and give it a spin.
