It's interesting that the people of the Netherlands are powerful connoisseurs of the fine arts, and of music in particular (witness the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, consistently ranked one of the world's finest and with good reason). Yet the Netherlands has produced relatively little music of continuing popularity, and none apart from the Renaissance choral music of Sweelinck which has become well-known outside the country.
Just recently I pulled out and revisited two CDs of music by the Dutch composer Alphons Diepenbrock, a contemporary of Gustav Mahler. These two records were issued in 1990 by the Chandos Records label in England, and I can only find one other disc of this composer's music. Even the apparently ubiquitous Naxos label doesn't seem to have touched him.
More's the pity, because Diepenbrock was a composer of considerable individuality and quality, and this music survives repeated listening uncommonly well. Most of Diepenbrock's list of over 100 compositions consists of vocal music, often with orchestra. In spite of his skillful handling of the orchestra, he wrote very few purely orchestral works apart from those destined for use in the theatre.
The title of one of the works in this collection is Hymn to the Night and the note writer shrewdly remarks that this could stand as the motto of Diepenbrock's entire musical output. Definitely his music is often quiet, lightly orchestrated with constantly shifting textures, and shot through with equal measures of lyrical beauty mixed with melancholy and sadness. The quality, subtlety and beauty of his works is the more remarkable when you find out that he was entirely self-taught as a composer and musician.
The first of the two CDs comprises orchestral works, and here we get three compositions written for the theatre: suites to the plays Marsyas and Elektra, and an overture to The Birds. Any experts reading this will have recognized that two of these are classical Greek dramas, and the third (Marsyas) is a Dutch play based on a Greek legend. The affinity is explained by the fact that Diepenbrock was trained as a scholar of classical Greek and Latin language and literature, and worked all his life as a teacher and tutor of those disciplines.
The overture to The Birds is one of the few genuinely happy pieces Diepenbrock wrote, and has a jolly, upbeat atmosphere entirely appropriate to the satirical comedy which it prefaced. The two suites are full of interesting touches, and the accompanying notes summarize the stories of the plays well enough that the listener can sense how the music would fit in with the stage action.
Set amid these riches is the crown jewel of the collection, the ineffably lovely Hymn for Violin and Orchestra. This is a single long movement, almost 13 minutes, in which two simple slow melodies are developed through transformations and varied orchestrations in an almost endless stream of melody from the solo instrument and orchestra. It remains for long periods grounded firmly in the home key, a fact which throws into the highest relief two simple modulations given to the orchestra right at the end of the work. Violinist Emmy Verhey plays with beautiful tone and long singing legato lines.
The second disc contains four symphonic songs, a form which Diepenbrock cultivated and developed throughout his life. The nearest parallel I can think of in the music of others is the long final movement of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, in which a single soloist sings an extended setting of poetry developing a whole string of related but contrasting ideas. In many ways, I find that Diepenbrock's work in this form is fully up to that high standard, and indeed his music was known to and admired by Mahler (and by Richard Strauss).
In these pieces, Diepenbrock set poetry or prose-poetry of high quality to music of remarkable transparency, often achieved by using small chamber-like ensembles within the orchestra, and by scoring many of the parts for solo instruments. The result is certainly similar in texture to Mahler's work which was not widely known at the time.
He composed two pieces titled Hymn to the Night and we hear the second one here (words by Novalis). It's followed by another piece simply entitled The Night (Hölderlin). Both of these are for mezzo-soprano and orchestra. The third work is a shorter piece, Few understand the mystery of Love (Novalis again) for tenor and orchestra. Finally, for baritone and orchestra, we hear In the great silence to words by Nietzche. All four have moments of memorable melody and harmony, and repay close study with the texts in hand to see how the composer's music artfully follows the meanings of the words he chose to set. My own personal favourite is the Hymn to the Night but all four are fine works and merit greater attention. The vocal soloists all provide first-rate work, but the best of them (in my opinion) is mezzo-soprano Linda Finnie. However tenor Christoph Homberger and bass-baritone Robert Holl are by no means also-rans.
Throughout the two discs, the playing of the Residentie Orchestra of The Hague under conductor Hans Vonk is exemplary, as is the rich Chandos sound which serves this music uncommonly well. The entire recording is available for download as a complete 2-for-1 album from Chandos, and from Classics Online (the Naxos download website). Chandos also stocks the 2-for-1 CD album.
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