Paysages (1923)

Landscapes in orchestral music are not uncommon. In the string-quartet repertoire, on the other hand, they are rare – so rare that, but for his own Dans les Montagnes (In the Mountains), also written in 1923, Bloch’s Paysages (Landscapes) might even be unique. Vaughan Williams’s Seventh Symphony and Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony immediately come to mind as examples of large-scale evocations of scenes of the kind Bloch depicted on a very much smaller scale in, respectively, the first and second movements of Paysages. The third movement, however, is surely the only piece of music inspired by the attractions of Tongatapu.

North was stimulated by Robert J. Flaherty’s documentary film Nanook of the North, which so excited the composer that he couldn’t sleep until he had created a musical glimpse of the Arctic landscape as he saw it. What he achieved is a string-quartet texture from which, for just over two minutes, all warmth is excluded. He does it (without the aid of a wind machine) by means of icy violin sounds, an alien septuple metre, and instrumental lines which, though not unmelodious, are expressive of little but desolation.

Although he had left Geneva for the United States in 1916 and was to become an American citizen in 1924, Bloch retained a deep affection for his native Switzerland, as several of his works confirm. Alpestre is a short tribute to the mountain landscape based on the melody introduced in the opening bars by the viola, which is featured in this unsensational but beauifully written piece as the principal messenger of nostalgia.

Ever since his early exposure to the music of the synagogue Bloch had had an interest in the exotic. His first orchestral score (which remained unpublished) was a massive Symphonie orientale while mature works like Schelemo and the Suite hébraïque are among his most admired compositions. So it is not surprising that, somehow having got to know about the traditional dance rhythms of the island of Tongatapu in the Tongan archipelago, he should exploit them in Tongataboo (French spelling), which must be one of the most colourful of all example of string-quartet scoring.