TANSMAN: SYMPHONIES, VOLUME 4

With his recordings of the composer’s symphonies with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Oleg Caetani has done much to revive interest in the music of Alexandre Tansman. This fourth volume, concentrating on symphonic works for smaller forces, has been recorded with the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana. Sinfonietta No. 1 dates back to 1924 and reveals the influence of Stravinsky while also featuring elements of Polish folklore. The much later Sinfonietta No. 2, commissioned by Polish Radio and composed in 1978, was premiered during the celebrations of the composer’s eightieth birthday in Poland, for which Tansman was welcomed back to his homeland after an absence of many decades. The two Sinfoniettas are complemented by the Sinfonia piccola, written in 1951 – 52 on a commission from the French Ministry of Education and dedicated to the famous surgeon Dr Jean-Louis Lortat-Jacob, and, finally, the premiere recording of the Symphonie de chambre of 1960, the comparatively dense textures of which ring with echoes of Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge.