The Unsung Wastebasket: what deserves to go in?

[Ilja]

Dear all, a while ago we took the time to list, in several categories, the best pieces we'd come across in our journey through the romantic unsungs. But perhaps we should not dance around the fact that we also get to listen to pieces that have us wondering why the composer, soloist, conductor and orchestra ever thought it was a good idea to let them loose on the world.

So, I'm asking you to list the pieces of music that proved themselves low points in your musical foray. I'm guessing that this may be a tad more controversial than the "best-of" lists, and opinion is probably more divided. For instance, I consider the Arnold Mendelssohn C major symphony to be a joyous discovery, while others described it as "dryly academic". And those are all legitimate experiences.

So in that (compulsory!) spirit of tolerance, can you give a reasoned* top-three of the works that had you scratching your head in chagrin or made you burst out in laughter? Or perhaps, both?

* and no, just "not liking it" isn't enough; I don't really like Nielsen's 4th symphony but that doesn't make it a bad piece.

[John Boyer]

This is my second attempt at commenting on this. It occurs me this can get ugly fast, so participants should be prepared to make careful arguments.

For me, there is often nothing technically wrong with the worst unsungs that I can recall. Rather, they fail simply because they are dull. A technically innovative work can be dull as dishwater, while one that follows a predictable and well-trodden path can be quite entertaining, albeit unoriginal.

And if dullness is the culprit (and I have in mind nearly all of the chamber music of Volkmann and Vieuxtemps), how do we quantify that dullness? How do we express the vulgarity of Draeseke's Piano Concerto (though I enjoy that work quite a bit as a sort of guilty pleasure) or the cringe-worthy and amateurish sturm-und-drang that opens Rubinstein's Sixth Symphony (although that work actually redeems itself as it unfolds)?

This is a tough nut to crack, especially in that I firmly agree with Ilja that what one likes is not necessarily good and what one dislikes is not necessarily bad. There are many works that I dislike which I acknowledge as masterpieces, and many works that I enjoy that I acknowledge are weak.

[terry martyn]

I was thinking of sitting this one out,and I fully agree with all the general comments that John makes (not necessarily the specific examples). It is all too easy to lose objectivity.

I hardly ever comment about chamber music, sung or unsung, for I have never cared for the genre, and so I am even more unqualified than usual to venture there (Alexander Fesca and Hans Franke being the only exceptions,I recall).  And it has to be a really disappointing orchestral unsung piece to put me off totally (like the Grandval oboe concerto ,which is a live topic in Recordings and Broadcasts). Even that Suppe "symphony" can be appreciated to some degree if one thinks he actually composed a suite.

[Mark Thomas]

Echoing John, I'm going to have to plead for time. Lots of it. It's easy enough to scan the 1600 or so composers in my collection and come up with more than a few whom I could nominate in the category of "really shouldn't have bothered". To home in on individual works is very much trickier, partly because it's much easier to remember unsung works which I rate highly because I listen to them comparatively frequently, whereas pieces which I don't think much of inevitably aren't going to get any play time after a couple of hearings, and so fade from the memory. That's not the case with works in the general repertoire: Ravel's mind-numbingly repetitive Bolero for example, because they're constantly on air. Secondly there's the issue which Ilja raises: I know what makes for a work which I enjoy and what makes for one which I won't (copious chromaticism, for instance), but that doesn't make such pieces poor works, and I don't have enough confidence in my own judgement to argue the case. So, this is an interesting but challenging exercise which, in my case, is not one to be hurried.

[Ilja]

This is admittedly tricky. I think that the pretense of objectivity is mostly a myth when dealing with something as emotional as art and aesthetics, but dismissing a work of art without substantive argumentation is a bit cheap. But for the sake of developing our musical senses, rejecting works of art can be just as important as embracing them.

For my selection, I'm therefore weighing the success of the pieces: do they succeed even remotely in living up to their purported ambition. I won't lie, even there I had trouble finding a threesome.

1. Lorenzo Perosi, Piano Concerto in A minor (1916). This has been my textbook example of a failed musical project for years. The only available recording of the work (Mario Delli Ponti with Orchestra Sinfonica "Carlo Coccia" under Arturo Sacchetti) isn't that bad, but it fails to rescue the work from its plethora of shortcomings: the lack of flow between themes, the over-long and static development sections, the lack of any emotional "center" even within movements, and the schmaltzy orchestration, it all comes together in an exhausting listen of nearly 50 minutes. I'd say that even for Perosi this is a sub-standard work; he wrote a few orchestral suites using Italian folk tunes to good effect (although even there, succinctness wasn't his forte).

2. Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Symphony "No. 7" in E-flat major, Op. 72bis (1892; Completion by Semyon Bogatyryev 1951-5). Hardly an unsung composer of course, but a mostly unsung work that has nonetheless seen some recordings by the likes of Ormandy, Järvi père, Rozhdestvensky and others. Why, I can't fathom. The base material (Tchaikovsky's 3rd Piano Concerto, the Scherzo Fantastique, and the Andante and Finale for Piano and Orchestra) is decent enough, but most of it isn't really top-notch Tchaikovsky either: I'm particularly referring to the Andante and Finale, which Taneyev kind of managed to bend into shape. Bogatyryev is clearly no Taneyev however, and no one can save the rather trite thematic material of the Finale; that one's squarely on Pyotr Ilyich himself and his abandonment of the movement proves that he knew it, too. The injection of an orchestration that owes much to the noisier section of the Soviet socialist realist school does very little to elevate the work. Part of the problem is also that it has to measure up to Tchaikovsky's contemporary works, and it's not really something that benefits from being compared to the Pathétique - or honestly any other Tchaikovsky symphony. Contrary to the Perosi, I think this can be enjoyed in a "so bad it's good" sort of way; but let's be honest, here's a good reason we haven't been forced to endure this for a while now.

3. Ernst Boehe, Aus Odysseus' Fahrten (1903). This was released on two separate discs a few decades ago, and we had to wait months for the finale (and some other stuff). Well, that was a waste of anticipation. In theory, this one-and-a-half-hour behemoth has everything: sweeping grand gestures, (literally) epic subject matter and lush orchestration. In practice, it doesn't work at all: it sounds entirely derivative, themes are hit and miss, development meanders on endlessly making Odysseus' journey feel as though you're experiencing it in real time, and melodic lines get lost as the whole thing ultimately collapses under the earnest ambition of someone who clearly lacks the skill to pull anything of this magnitude off. The maddening thing is that a) this sort of elaborate late romantic tone poem should be right up my street and b) that it actually sounds really good some of the time, but we're dealing with a composer who couldn't pace a piece of music if his life depended on it. We know, because he tried again a few years later with the almost equally exhausting Taormina. At least that's over after half an hour.

[terry martyn]

I'm giving the Perosi a listen, as I type, after such an enticing (lack of) recommendation. It has  a Ponti too - (sadly not the Ponti we love so well, but a kind of Howard Shelley-Ponti). With the exception of the Sgambati - and that was probably down to the mesmeric performance of Bolet's, I haven't admired any of the relatively few Italian Romantic concertos.

Sadly,I reckon even maestro Ponti would have had his work cut out to rescue this one from the living dead. My word, a plaintive  solo violin has just entered the morgue.

Ilja is right - this is textbook how-not-to-do-it.

[John Boyer]

Another thing which will delay my participation in Ilja's suggestion is that I long ago removed the worst of the deservedly unsungs from my record shelves. The only ones I have left are those that are coupled with something of greater value that's worth keeping.

Also, I recall in the earlier challenges the joy of listening to old favorites again so as to develop arguments in their favor.  It was fun to revisit them and listen to them with new ears and to identify the things that made them so worth recommending.

In the current project, I am faced with the joyless task of slogging through pieces I don't like to put into words just exactly why I don't like them -- a much less pleasant exercise.

But we shall see!  It's certainly a challenge.

[Ilja]

I may have slightly cheated by compiling a "worst-of" playlist over the years, which made this considerably easier (but still not self-evident). 

But it's also meant to be just a little fun, so don't ponder everything too much.

[Mark Thomas]

Like others, I've really struggled with Ilja's challenge. Most unsung musical duds are forgotten after a couple of hearings and, like John, I don't find the prospect of listening again to those that I do remember at all beguiling. Therefor, so that I can write with a little authority about works I know reasonably well, I've gone slightly off-piste and will nominate three failures in different genres by a composer I'm well known here for having promoted for over forty years: Joachim Raff. I feel disloyal in doing so, but I'm sure that even the most respected composer had the occasional off-day and Raff was certainly no exception.

The first nomination is the Variations on an Original Theme Op.170 for piano (listen on YouTube here). This is a big work, the 20 variations take almost 27 minutes, and most of them are in the awkward metres of 5/8 and 7/8. It's Raff at his most self-consciously "clever", revelling in his self-taught expertise, but I find it a sterile exercise in showing off his compositional skill, there's none of Raff's usual emotional warmth or melodic generosity. The theme itself is unmemorable and that's true of almost all the variations as well, so when an attractive idea does at last appear towards the end of the work, after all Raff's meretricious noodling, it's so incongruously similar to one of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies as to be almost laughable.

The second nomination is the opera Die Eifersüchtigen WoO.54 (listen on YouTube here). Even Raff's wife thought the work dramatically inept, and she was right. The main culprit is the libretto which Raff himself wrote. It's over-long and over-complicated for a very simple tale. The opera lasts well over two hours and very little happens, the music (once the excellent, fizzing overture is out of the way) is pleasant enough but essentially wallpaper and unmemorable. There's hardly any dramatic tension, the seven characters are not musically differentiated, and the work has a most uncharacteristic lack of momentum throughout. Raff was capable of so much better, as a listen to the earlier opera Dame Kobold would demonstrate, but Die Eifersüchtigen was essentially composed for his own amusement, with no expectation of performance, and that shows in the flabby libretto and, for Raff, uninspired music. So this dud is not a laughable failure, but rather just a big disappointment.

My third nominee (and perhaps a controversial one) is an own goal: Raff's Symphony No.6 Op.189 (listen on YouTube here). Once again, not so much a risibly bad piece as a huge let down. Coming after the enormous success of both the 3rd Im Walde and 5th Lenore symphonies, public and critics alike were anticipating another large scale programme symphony, and instead got a half hour-long work similar in style to the unprogrammatic 2nd and 4th symphonies, but lumbered with an ridiculously portentous programme, which I am convinced (but have so far failed to prove) was tacked on by Raff as an afterthought. The music is, once again, Raff at his most smugly self-satisfied, he boasted that it was his cleverest work to date. However, although it is typically melodic, the themes are generally trite. It's colourfully orchestrated, but each of the movements is structurally repetitive, with an over-reliance on sequence, almost as if Raff was on auto-pilot. The tail-chasing finale is particularly bad in this respect. No wonder it came as a such a huge disappointment to his army of admirers and the critics waiting to pounce. Had he made it clear that he just wanted to write a small-scale non-programmatic symphony as he had done previously to follow his imposing 1st and 3rd symphonies then this work, musically slighter than his 2nd and 4th though it is, might have passed muster, but to weigh it down with the motto: "Lived: struggled, suffered, fought— Died—Glorified" was asking for the reception it received.

[John Boyer]

Good choices, Mark, and well-argued.  From Raff, we have a right to expect more.

[Ilja]

Thinking about it, "disappointment" is a more workable criterium than an absolute lack of quality for exactly the reasons John and Mark mention; we block whatever we think unworthy of our attention from memory, but anticipating a positive experience and then being let down is probably quite a bit worse. And come to think of it, two on my list also fall in that category.

[John Boyer]

That's exactly it, Ilja.  And now that I'm looking at this less as "colossal failures" and more as "colossal disappointments", I already have a dozen contenders.  Suddenly I've gone from struggling to come up with anything to struggling to pare down the list.  Oh, boy!

[Mark Thomas]

One of Ilja's eminently justifiable choices is Bogatyryev's "completion" of Tchaikovsky's E flat major Symphony, and I just want to make a plea for the first movement, at least. Having listened to it again, it seems to me to be quite a strong piece of work, certainly as worthwhile as anything in the first three symphonies. Of course, that's damning with faint praise for a work written at the end of his career, but I do think it has merit within his overall output. I wouldn't say the same about the Symphony's other three movements, which get progressively worse.

[tuatara442442]

I echo Mark's praise of "Tchaikovsky 7"'s first movement. It is really an exciting and memorable movement full of momentum. I got to know it from the Piano Concerto No. 3 version, and having found the lengthy cadenza a bit of a drag, turned to the version without cadenza that is "Tchaikovsky 7"'s first movement. Although the concerto version without the cadenza would be more exciting to me

[SV340450843]

I don't consider myself and expert in music but I've been years hearing and practicing piano so I think that I can say that these 3 works are not really good

1.- Sergei Bortkiewicz - "Der Chinese" from Marionettes Op.54
I picture Bortkiewicz composing this piece as him being impatient because he don't know what more add to the set and then he takes some augmented chords and some cites from his his 1st Concerto and makes this thing... that doesn't even sound like chinese at all!
(P.D.: I feel bad for roasting my favorite composer, BUT I REALLY HATE THAT PIECE  )

2.- Max Jentsch - Konzertetüde Op.28 No.4
A really hard-to-process piece... only hear it. It's not really pleasing at all, altough it makes a really clever use of chromaticism, it's too repetitive and EXAGERATEDLY LONG. I really think that those chromatic semi cadenzas are really obnoxious because they cut short the flow of the music and are not really suitable for a "concert etude" because it's not really for practice but for recitals and concerts. However, I think that my opinion could change if some human interpretation makes this piece shine, not like a MIDI that is not making justice to the piece.

3.- Henri Ravina - Elegie Op.22
How could a lament be so joyful!? Only hear the piece, at least how it beings. But, still, the piece doesn't even has a change of mood. Did the composer chose a bad title? Or the editors messed up the title? We can't know...

It's my subjective opinion... I think that I could have chosen better pieces to go in the wastebasket but most pieces that I remind are the ones I like.