MODERN GREEK COMPOSER

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27894, 16 February 1956, Page 6

MODERN GREEK COMPOSER

Works Of Nikolaos Skalkottas RECOGNITION AFTER DEATH (From a Reuter Correspondent.) ATHENS. Nikolaos Skalkottas, a modern Greek composer, who during his lifetime failed to win any recognition is today, six years after his premature death at the age of 45 in 1949, on the way to becoming famous.

When some of his works were performed for the first time in recent years in England, Germany and Greece, well-known critics f acclaimed Skalkottas as a composer of the front rank and an “original musical genius” in our times. Yet only a tithe of his works are known to the world, for Skalkottas, wh6 died when he was an obscure subordinate violinist in the Athens State Orchestra, kept the secret of his compositions even from his closest friends.

It was only after he died that a specially appointed committee painstakingly gathered together his work, much of which even today is unknown both in his own country and throughout the world.

Probably one of the most prolific composers of modern times, Skalkottas composed some 120 works, with about 450 movements, 57,000 bars and 6,200 pages, the playing of which would require 32 hours. Only next spring and summer will the world hear for the first time one of his major compositions—a 40-minute fairy drama entitled “With the Spell of May” which is to be given in Paris, Mannheim and at the 1956 Athens Music and Drama Festival. Skalkottas was born in 1904 at Chalkis, capital of the island of Eoboea, north of Attica. He started music lessons, at the age of five, with his father who was an amateur flautist with the town’s municipal band, and

J? ter . became an assiduous pupil of Odeum w here he graduated ship a gold medal and scholarHe then went to Germany to perfect his violin studies, which he soon, however, abandoned in favour of the school of composition at the Hochschule fur Musik. There, he became the Pupil of famous musicians like Paul Kann, Kurt Weill, Philipp Jarnach and, 2 n u lly for six y ear s. of Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of the twelve-tone system, who set his mark on Skalkottas s work as a composer. .Returning to Greece after 1933, Skalkottas started his professional violin playing with the Athens State Orchestra and occasionally with Radio Athens. In 1946, he married a Greek pianist and they had two children, lhe birth of his second child, howsvefr5 ve fr was the indirect cause of his death. For the hyper-sensitive Skalkottas suffered from hernia and. wanting to avoid troubling his wife who was in the last stage of pregnancy, he did not mention his own critical condition. At night, when he was in great pain, he tied a handkerchief round his mouth to stifle his groans. Unconcerned by his illness as he was by his work of composition, Skalkottas died a few days before his second child was born. After his death, friends found in his drawers scores of manuscripts which he had never mentioned just as he had failed to consult a doctor about his illness. Fund Raised, by Appeal

Twenty of his friends and colleagues formed the “friends of Skalkottas’s work” society, and undertook the arduous task of setting up a “Skalkottas Archive” by gathering, copying, editing, microfilming and preserving his work. With a fund of £lOOO raised through a public appeal, the friends of Skalkottas started their search, and believe that they have found most of the composer’s works. “Some had to be sought as far afield as Germany in the various boarding houses where the careless -Skalkottas had left them behind, probably with an unpaid bill,” Mt Joannis Papaioannou, music critic ano’ secretary of the Skalkottas Society has reported.

Mr Papaioannou, *an admirer o Skalkottas’s work, says that the great est moment in his life as a musiciai was when he once accompanie Skalkottas at the piano. “In his playing of the violin Skalkottas was something exceptional,” Mr Papaioannou says, “not only as a virtuoso, but because of the special use he made of his instrument. His tone was absolutely clear and transparent. He used very little vibrato but the little which he did use gave a special warmth to his performance. He liked the very high positions of the violin where his instrument sounded like a flute.

But although great as a performer, Skalkottas was really outstanding as a composer, as is amoly proved by the enthusiastic reception of the few works of his already performed throughout the world.” Since his death, works of Skalkottas have been performed by such famous orchestras as the New York Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic, the Goldsborough Orchestra and many famous orchestras in Germany. Italy and Greece. Acclaimed by Critics

German critics acclaimed Skalkottas as a “real discovery,” while the musical critic of “The Times,” London, after a performance of Skalkottas’s ten sketches for strings at Wigmore Hall, London, last June, wrote: “Skalkottas’s ten sketches for strings refreshed weary spirits . . . filled a canvass with sound calculated to that nicety where fullness contains no redundance . . . it is of the Viennese, of Schubert’s heirs, that the blend of passion and innocence and tunefulness reminds the listener.”

In the endeavour to promote Skalkottas’s music, the Athens Friends of Skalkottas met with an unhoped for success. Inspired by the conductorWalter Goehr, who conducted parts ol Skalkottas’s Fairy Drama with the Athens State Orchestra, in Athens, in 1951, a London and Vienna music publishing house offered to undertake the publication of his work free of charge. They have already published nine works, including one of his earlier compositions, the “Greek Dances,” which is a fine orchestral work based on Greek folk tunes.