Richard Taruskin's remarkable essay on the exiled Russian composer Arthur Lourié (1892-1966) in Russian Music at Home and Abroad has sent me on a detour through the elusive, at times enigmatically potent world of Lourié's music. Posterity remembers him best as one of Stravinsky's many intellectual sidekicks and amanuenses; his 1928 essay "Neogothic and Neoclassic" set up the Stravinsky-Schoenberg dichotomy that long animated (and distorted) discussion of principal twentieth-century trends. There is, however, a great deal more to Lourié than that, from his early Futurist pieces — including experiments in atonality and microtonality — to his brief reign as a radical Bolshevik functionary and on to various adventures in the West. A three-disc survey of Lourié's piano music just appeared on Capriccio, with Moritz Ernst at the keyboard; the highlight is the 1915 piece Formes en l'air, with its visionary free-floating notation. I also went back to Gidon Kremer's recording of the Concerto da Camera, whose wry, melancholy neoclassicism anticipates Schnittkean polystylism, and to haunting choral works on an old Le Chant du Monde disc. What I'd most like to hear, though, is a first-rate rendition of Lourié's Concerto Spirituale, whose score is online at Boosey. Taruskin discusses it at fascinating length, noting the possibility that its cool sacred sonorities influenced Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. The bootleg YouTube video above, apparently from a 1995 Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin concert with Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting and Viktoria Postnikova at the piano, is all but unlistenable, but it gives a tantalizing hint of what might be Lourié's masterwork.
