Ed Spanjaard- Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.
Like mathematics or chess, counterpoint is one of those cerebral endeavors, creative and arcane, reaching down the ages to command great passion, intense cunning, and timeless truth. It is a language, like magic spells, requiring uncommon abilities and spoken only by initiates, whose struggles and triumphs are never understood by the world. In 1947, Koechlin noted his hope of hearing his last great symphonic works, the Offrande musicale sur le nom de BACH and Le buisson ardent, before he died. The latter received its premiere a little less than a year after his passing, in November 1951, while the Offrande musicale was not heard until May 19, 1973, with the RSO Frankfurt led by Juan Pablo Izquierdo. Appropriately, Busoni's Fantasia Contrappuntistica comprised the remainder of the program. Composed in 1942, as Koechlin passed his 75th birthday, and orchestrated in 1946, the Offrande musicale is one of the great hommages -- pre-eminent in the company of similar things by Liszt, Reger, and Busoni -- and occupies a central place in Koechlin's own oeuvre while looming as one of the towering symphonic works of the century. As in Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum, the use of Baroque forms (passacaglia, canon, fugue) affords entry into an elusive, allusive, multifaceted art. Koechlin weaves the familiar BACH signature motif (B flat, A, C, B natural) through nearly every bar, working it -- in imitation of its great model, Bach's Musikalisches Opfer -- with staggering resourcefulness through a dozen sections, each with its own timbral character (including a beguiling "album leaf" for piano solo) playing nearly 50 minutes. The intellectual cast of so much concentrated writing is further meliorated by a Gothic aura, owing to the prominence of the organ and the evocation of, among other things, Gabrieli's antiphonals, Renaissance polyphony -- from the high style of the great masses to the vein of popular consort music -- and Bach's graver contrapuntal essays, but refracted through a tradition in which Lully, the Couperins, Rameau, Grétry, Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ and the modally colored Te Deum, and Fauré are the great names. But the Offrande is not pastiche. Koechlin's vast awareness issues in a rapt interplay of sinuous lines, polytonally informed and colored by the addition of saxophones and an ondes martenot to an already large orchestra, in which the spirit of Bach mingles with an art nouveau sensibility in fluent meditations, radiantly dreamlike yet powerful, and by turns lofty, serene, recondite, passionate, eldritch, and in the final glorious allegro -- sonore, triomphal -- joyously tumultuous.