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Ernst Linko happened to be the pianist who premiered Leiviskä's concerto back in the day, by the way. Linko's #2 would make a good coupling - or even better would be #1, which is still unrecorded. It's also a short piece, somewhere within 15-20 mins or so.

Very fine singer and teacher, he very nearly lost his life in the Finnish Continuation War from a Russian tank shell which missed him by a hair. He always emphasized the importance of clear diction in singing and left behind a legacy of recordings that are still regularly requested and heard in radio over here. He did concerts up to around 90 years of age.

No, there's no relation to Beethoven's Kakadu, Eric.

Does anyone know where the title "Kakadu" comes from?

Carl August von Görner's play "Prinz Papagei" that this Overture was composed for features a prince turned into a parrot because he kept talking too much. I'm guessing calling it Kakadu-Ouverture was just Hiller's fancy. Besides the name, there's no connection to Offenbach's Vert-vert "Kakadu" overture that I can hear.

...However, in the play the parrot the prince turned into was actually a lori, not a kakadu. So shouldn't it be called Lori-Overture? Surely an unpardonable oversight by Hiller, this.

It's great news, but also a missed opportunity to include one of Raff's fine overtures instead of the overplayed Weber. One of his Shakespeare overtures should have fit the bill just fine I'm sure. Personally, I'm still waiting to hear any of Raff's music in Finland...

Thank you very much for making Jebe's symphony available, I look forward to listening to it. There was a documentary on Norwegian NRK TV, Jebe i Mayaland, from 2018, but it is no longer available. I did manage to record it, though.

You're very welcome, Wheesht and Ilja. I also saw this documentary being mentioned somewhere but could not find and watch it. Was it subtitled?

to my ears it does sound a bit like late Sinding with a Mariachi band (that opening of the Finale!).

 

...Now that I listen to it, I'm noticing that Dorico appears to add an unwanted fade-in effect to start of each movement in this audio. I didn't catch it before. It's unfortunate that the way Dorico sometimes goes about its features is first of all not to inform the user and secondly having no way to turn said features off when desired.


But returning to Jebe, I'd be amiss not to include this timeless quote from the memoirs of a Mexican musician Daniel Ayala, which perfectly summarizes Jebe's eccentric character...

... he was always disheveled, dirty, very drunk most of the time, and many times he forgot his engagements as orchestra conductor or violinist. ... He lived alone in a small cottage – a country-house – provided by Sarita, where he composed his works with a surprising mastery, working almost the way real geniuses do. The natural disorder of the "Study," with sheets of music strewn on the floor, a bad odor from the jumble of wrapping paper bearing decomposed food – tins, mostly – and his overall appearance in his daily life gave him the appearance of a true "bohemian." Many times in a rehearsal or performance, upon opening his instrument case a bad smell assaulted the noses of his companions because along with the violin or viola, in the case there were also some bits of rotten raw meat, stored and forgotten as his food.

This symphony was performed in Oslo in 1932 as part of a concert featuring some of Jebe's works, alongside the overture Uxmal and selections from his ballet Caves of Loltun among other works. There are some cuts in the manuscript for the 1st, 3rd and 4th movements that I opted to take in this reconstruction. While I cannot be certain for the reason of these cuts, I'm guessing they were made for practical considerations for the 1932 concert either by Jebe or the concert's conductor Olav Kielland. Notably, in the 1st movement, the whole of recapitulation is cut (!).

[Halfdan Jebe]

Halfdan Jebe (1868–1937) was a Norwegian composer, violinist and conductor. He received his education in Oslo, Leipzig, Berlin and Paris, and was a close friend of Frederick Delius.

In the early 1900s Jebe moved to Mérida, the capital of Yucatan region in Mexico. He became fascinated with Mayan culture, customs and folk music and began composing music in that idiom. After settling in Mérida he largely withdrew from Norwegian musical life, but was always greeted with interest and enthusiasm whenever his music was performed in his homeland. Jebe attempted to introduce music of Mexican composers in Norway, but these attempts did not meet with any lasting success. His legacy is nearly completely forgotten nowadays and there are no recordings of his orchestral music whatsoever.

His best known works were the operas Maya dignidad and Vesle Kari Rud, the overture Uxmal, two ballets based on Mayan legends, a children's suite/ballet La ardilla (The squirrel) and his only Symphony in A minor. He also composed other orchestral music including suites, festival music and an orchestral paraphrase on Sobre las olas.

For more information on Jebe, this book has the most complete biographical account on his life that I've been able to find: LINK. There's also this paper by the Frederick Delius society with a chapter on Jebe: LINK.


     Symphony in A minor

Jebe's Symphony in A minor bears the subtitle Desde el destino hacia el ideal (From destiny towards the ideal) and was composed in the memory of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, a socialist Yucatan governor who was executed in 1924. Jebe, who was a friend and supporter of Puerto, tells in an interview that he was at a classroom in a nearby building and heard the gunshots when Puerto was shot. The event affected him deeply and inspired him to write this symphony.

Jebe's autograph(s) for this work are pretty messy, and he was haphazard in his notation in certain aspects. For example dynamic markings are rarely given for instrument entrances, and it's often left ambigious whether 1 or a2 instruments in a staff should be playing. Despite the difficulties of the draft-like sources I had to work with I think the results sound passable in Noteperformer.

Such a bizarre musical curiosity, isn't it! This was a difficult, but very rewarding project to study and put together. There's hardly any symphony from a Nordic composer written under stranger circumstances than this one. What do you think?

YOUTUBE

[Vorspiel to Frühlingsnacht]

Gerhard Schjelderup composed a one-act opera titled Frühlingsnacht (Vårnatt) in 1905. He revised it further in 1921, composing two additional one-act operas "Herbstnacht" and "Winternacht" to form a complete, three-act opera. Each of the three acts were designed to be performable on their own, as well.

I find the Vorspiel to Frühlingsnacht very beautiful with its seductive atmosphere and entrancing woodwind writing. It builds up to a quasi-wagnerian climax, and as the curtain is raised and the opera proper begins, the music has died down to mere quiet whisperings of motives introduced back in the opening section.

"Vårnatt" was released on LP in 1982 (Discogs), but so far I've not been able to find it...

Youtube

Thanks mikehopf, strictly speaking not a recording yet, at least a real one. I just love this Overture! I went to the little extra trouble to make the score and parts which are on IMSLP in order to make it more accessible to performers...

As far as I know "Prinz Papagei" is the only incidental music by Hiller. It was composed during his very productive period of 1870s, during which Hiller had turned his attention to orchestral music after focusing on operas for the better part of the 1850-60s (none of Hiller's operas gained traction or success). This 1870s period saw the composition of many large scale pieces such as his Violin Concerto, cantatas, Piano Concerto 3 and the Symphony in C major among other things.

"Prinz Papagei" consists of this Overture plus 22 numbered sections and a few unnumbered short cues. Full manuscript digitized by GUF.

Text of the play in German which was written by Carl August Görner.

Yeah this is pretty bad for Draeseke. Despite some colorful orchestration at times this march is just so hollow and repetitive music. Could have been shorter by about a half to be passable. It was good to hear it for its historical context even if just once and never again.

["Mot Nordpolen!"]

Now that summer is here and many countries around the world are suffering from heatwaves, it's a perfect time to cool off with a little visit to the arctic regions. Here is the opening music to "Mot Nordpolen!" (To the North Pole) by Johan Halvorsen.

Described either as an Operette or a Burlesk Songspiel in three Acts, its text was written by the Norwegian author Vilhelm Dybwad. It's a satirical take on the polar exploration hubbub that was happening around early 1900s. According to critics the flimsy libretto was faltering especially towards its 3rd act, but nevertheless managed to be thoroughly humorous with many good jokes and comedic jabs at its subject matter. Halvorsen's music received acclaim as well. The production's 1911 premiere run at Oslo Nationaltheatret (13 performances) was a smash success, but after this unfortunately "Mot Nordpolen" was placed in the drawer and never seen again...

Halvorsen destroyed the full score for reasons unknown, and most of the soloist song parts are lost as well. What is preserved are a full set of instrument parts, choral parts, a soloist part for 1 aria and Eskimo songs for the 2nd act. I also haven't found the libretto, and given the text was never published, it's anyone's guess whether any copies have survived or not...


Anyway, this was a fun reconstruction project. Halvorsen was a good composer (just listen to his Symphonies!) and he was especially productive in the realm of incidental music, producing a huge amount of scores for various plays.

YOUTUBE: Mot Nordpolen

You are right. A copyright claim by someone called Monika Adam!

Unknown to me at the time I created this reconstruction from Ansorge's autograph, the score had been edited and performance materials made a few months earlier by someone. That edition had registered for scientific copyright (or urtext or something, I've forgotten what it was called) of 25 years. Monika Adam represents a music rights organization which controls those copyrights and claimed the video.

In my opinion it was unfair, given that my electronic version, for which I did not even use their copyrighted edition at all, is quite in a different medium altogether and clearly there was no financial loss whatsoever this video could have caused them.

Recorded 8 years ago!! Wonder what else lies unissued in cpo's vaults...

Tell me about it! Still waiting to hear the Conrad Ansorge PC which Oliver Triendl recorded for cpo 2-3 years ago. Guess I have to pitch a tent and hold still for the next five or six years for it.

[Lemaistre]

Ah, I found the reference I was looking for about the piano score. In the book Joachim Raff: Portrait of a Life (Helene Raff's), p.128 footnote 1 says that Karl Klindworth had made piano arrangements of excerpts of the work (so not the full work, as I incorrectly recalled) in 1884. The same footnote says that this arrangement has unfortunately disappeared.

By the way, a minor error which persists in multiple sources about Dornröschen is the name of the 1856 premiere's Freier, incorrectly often given as "Lemaster", but according to the original playbill – is in fact Herr "Lemaistre".

The score is pretty thick. If anyone wishes to point me (with page numbers) towards those smaller instrumental sections I could happily to take a look.

Thanks for your kind words Mark. Dornröschen certainly is something very special in Raff's body of work, and the fact it was never published and only seldomly performed even in Raff's time is a loss worth correcting. I faintly recall reading somewhere that someone prepared a piano reduction of the whole work, but that the arrangement was lost already during Raff's lifetime. I wonder who that author was – I believe it was not Raff himself who had made it. But someone should correct me if I might be confusing this with some another anecdote.

maybe you might be tempted to try your hand at at least the next two shorter Parts, even if Part 4 is too big a task?

Oh, never say never. And never is anything, in the realm of music, impossible either! It's something to think about. The amount of work and time would be comparable to Franz Lachner's oratorio Moses that I reproduced in full in Dorico some years ago. A big project, but the issue really is not Dornröschen's length, just that those things take a big time commitment. For now, too early to say.