VARESE. Arcana.

MARTIN. Concerto for seven wind instruments, timpani, percussion and string orchestra. Chicago Symphony Or- chestra conducted by Jean Martinon. RCA Victor 0 RB6710 0 SB6710 (12 in., 32s. 3d. plus 5s. 9d. PT).

This is a strange but effective coupling. Between the classical clean-cut lines of the Martin concerto and the seemingly formless ejaculations of Varèse's Arcana (though in fact this is based on an 11-note idea) there is as little in common as there is between the former's dry wit and economy of texture (only strings and percussion with the seven solo wind instruments) and the latter's vaguely apocalyptic gestures and mammoth orchestral apparatus (113 players, including quintuple wind, 19 brass and a forest of percussion). Pointless to dig out parallels between the two men—their strictly conservative training, the facts of being born only seven years apart and of both being expatriates (Varèse a Frenchman who spent more than half his life in the USA, Martin a Swiss who has lived for the last 20 years in Holland): their music inhabits two utterly different worlds.

Varèse is obviously the more 'advanced' and pioneering composer: his early Arcana, written 40 years ago (and received with consternation at the time), can already be heard to be pointing forward to the purely electronic sounds to which his prophetic ear was attuned. It is harsh and intangible music that, as the composer put it, "explodes into space"—scarcely possible to describe, but primaevally exciting. It may, I fancy, have quite a vogue in this rich and brilliant recording, in which the playing of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is quite magnificent. The orchestra is equally outstanding in the lucid, tautly disciplined style—could anything be more dissimilar?— of Martin's concerto, which is perhaps his orchestral masterpiece (though less known than the Petite symphonie concertanle). In language neo-classic--an idiom which Varèse scorned as retrogressive—it has an opening Allegro!, of Roussel-like mordacity, an absorbingly beautiful elegiac slow movement built on a clock-like ostinato figure of alternating chords, and a slightly sardonic scherzo finale. The strings at first seem a little too subordinated to the solo winds in this balance, but the ear quickly accustoms itself to the perspective. L.S.