# Don't you just love when this happens?



## Manok (Aug 29, 2011)

You find a composer whose music you really enjoy only to find out he only had two or three other pieces, or at least only those two or three that anyone's ever recorded.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Haven't run into that one. What I have been confronted with is a few musicians who made one or two fine recordings and then either died or lost their 'in'.

I don't know how Robert Hagopian got his connection to the music of Bartók. He made a recording that some consider 'better than Kocsis', and then AIDS took him away.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

A brilliant disc - and the only Tyberg works recorded, at least according to Amazon.


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## TresPicos (Mar 21, 2009)

Manok said:


> You find a composer whose music you really enjoy only to find out he only had two or three other pieces, or at least only those two or three that anyone's ever recorded.


I know what you mean. I like Abel Decaux, who published only one piece.


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

The French composer Paul Dukas (1865-1935) is famous for his Sorcerer's Apprentice, 
but left only a handful of works. He was so self critical that he destroyed most of his output. But his only symphony is one of the best ever produced by a French composer, a gorgeous three movement work from 1897 that is rarely performed, which is a pity.
There are several recordings which have been available in our time, by Yan Pascal Tortelier,
Leonard Slatkin, and the late jean Fournet , for example, and a highly regarded older one by Jean Martinon on EMI , and the one I got to know the work on, by Walter Weller and the L.P.O on Decca, a terrific performance which as far as I know has never appeared on CD, which is a shame. 
Dukas' only opera Ariane &Barbe Bleue , which is sort of the prequel to Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle, is one of the greatest of French operas. By all means get the Telarc recording with Leon Botstein conducting. The ballet score "La Peri" is exotic and colorful. 
I don't know the piano sonata, but it is said to be a genuine masterpiece. 
Dukas was also a highly regarded teacher at the Paris conservatoire for many years, and Olivier Messiaen was one of his pupils.


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## Meaghan (Jul 31, 2010)

Manok said:


> You find a composer whose music you really enjoy only to find out he only had two or three other pieces, or at least only those two or three that anyone's ever recorded.


This happens to me a lot. Mostly with women. Except usually it's not that they didn't write a lot of music, it's just that people went "Oh, it's by a chick; nobody will buy it" and then didn't record it. That's why I just have lots of chamber music by women who also wrote symphonies--small groups of musicians are more easily persuaded to record music by obscure composers than are orchestras. Poo.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

superhorn said:


> The French composer Paul Dukas (1865-1935) is famous for his Sorcerer's Apprentice,
> but left only a handful of works. He was so self critical that he destroyed most of his output...


Similar thing with *Edgard Varese*, but he not only destroyed many of his works himself for the same reason as you say Dukas did, but also had a huge stroke of bad luck - a fire in a warehouse in Berlin, which housed all his pre-WW1 manuscripts, made them all go up in smoke.

Another French composer, one of my favourites,* Maurice Durufle*, also had a very small output (like some others who didn't fully get into the post-1945 trends, but lived right through the post-war period, he felt that he was out of touch with what was happening in music, so felt discouraged to compose).

Both Varese & Durufle's entire output consists of about three compact discs each. But of course, what little we have of them is worth it's weight in gold, imo.



> ...Dukas was also a highly regarded teacher at the Paris conservatoire for many years, and Olivier Messiaen was one of his pupils.


Well, I think that many composers who were teachers also left a huge legacy in that regard - not only Dukas, but also Busoni, Messiaen, Stanford, Parry, Milhaud, Schoenberg, Ginastera, Howard Hanson, our own Peter Sculthorpe, etc. - which is often overlooked when assessing the impact they made on musical history of their own times & way beyond...


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