Austrian composer Joseph Marx (1882-1964) stayed loyal to his late-Romantic aesthetic for his entire long life, winning acclaim from conservative audiences in the first part of the 20th century and vanishing almost without a trace immediately thereafter. He seems to be amassing a little bit of a cult following in the wake of Marc-André Hamelin's excellent Hyperion recording of his appealing "Romantic" Piano Concerto. There's a website devoted to his music, and now ASV is embarking on a series consisting of the complete orchestral works. Of course, the jury will be out for some time, certainly until the massive Autumn Symphony finally appears. The fact remains, though, that this cycle of three tone poems grouped as the Nature Trilogy is a bore--a lovely bore, granted, but boring nonetheless.

Stylistically these works, composed from 1922-25, resemble a sort of cross between Delius and Korngold, with some cribs from the French Impressionists (Debussy especially) tossed in now and again for good measure. The rich scoring (note the luscious opening of the Symphonic Night Music) tantalizes the ear and arouses expectations that remain resolutely unfulfilled. The music meanders a bit, stops, starts up again, achieves an attractive sound effect or two, stops, and starts again. Marx evidently had absolutely no sense of timing whatsoever in this "free form" medium (at least in comparison with the comparatively strictly structured Piano Concerto).

Symphonic Night Music's 26 minutes seem to run on forever. Spring Music, the last tone poem, begins with an introduction that's relatively short but that subjectively seems to take half an hour (or more) before the music gets going. Then it lurches from one unprepared climax to another, the last of which differs from those preceding it only by the fact that the music does actually stop once and for all.

Most successful is the second section, Idyll--Concertino on the pastoral fourth, and it's no coincidence that this piece also is the shortest and most structurally fluent. Lovely wind writing and a few characterful ideas give this work the strongest musical backbone of the three, despite its being the most expressively gentle. The real problem with this music is that despite luminous and transparent orchestral textures (very well realized in what sound like excellent performances) it obstinately lacks memorable thematic material, or even the kind of recurring gestures and motives that excite the listener's innate sense of form. Certainly themes do recur, but without any sense of why or what, structurally speaking, their return represents.

The tone poems of Joseph Suk, for example, composed in exactly the same period and in a very similar late-Romantic idiom, show much the same level of textural complexity and surface sheen, married to vastly better formal control. Compare the melodically gorgeous and shapely final movement ("Night") from Suk's A Summer Tale to Marx's flabby and (to all intents and purposes) tuneless Symphonic Night Music, and you'll understand the point immediately. And so despite excellent recorded sound and the committed advocacy of Steven Sloane and his Bochum orchestra, what we have here is music in which the closer you listen, the less you actually hear. These three works at least, unlike the Piano Concerto, do not make a very good case for reviving Marx's neglected output, and they will try the patience of any but his most committed partisans. Hopefully future issues will show the composer in a more favorable light.

--David Hurwitz