Most genuinely re-creative interpreters are also composers, and so it's particularly 
interesting to experience the 'first-hand' ideas of musicians whose reputations 
are otherwise founded on their performing skills. Very occasionally, revelations 
are such that the tables are turned - with Igor Markevitch for instance, whose 
creative output is in my opinion, actually more important than his work as a 
conductor. Artur Schnabel provides another case where the creative spark yielded 
more than is commonly acknowledged, whereas Rachmaninoff's considerable creative 
and recreative skills have usually received well-balanced critical acclaim.

However, great conductors traditionally harbour a mass of secret repertory: 
Furtwangler Klemperer, Walter, Weingartner Martinon Dorati, Paray and of course, 
Rafael Kubelik, all of whom have produced works worth hearing. The interesting 
point here is that very often traits inherent in a particular conductor's 
creative style (and influences) run parallel with elements in his recreative 
personality. For example, the malleable temperament evident in Furtwangler's 
Second Symphony is already familiar from his Wagner and Bruckner performances, 
while Klemperer's uncompromising sense of the monumental (witness the First 
Symphony) is inherent in his bold creative arsenal, and Kubelik's fluid, highly 
eventful writing recalls parallel attributes in his readings of virtually 
everything from Mozart to Schoenberg. If there is a fault worth mentioning - and 
here again one can coextend the argument to criticisms of certain Kubelik 
performances - it is a tendency to miss the wood for the trees.

The Orphikon symphony is mightily impressive: a bold, dramatic piece, the first 
movement of which starts out to a mysterious, irregular pulse and works its way 
through a wildly disruptive development (replete with whooping horns and high-
pitched drums) to a haunting coda that suggests a meeting of battle-scarred 
survivors. The powerful Adagio opens with a chorale-canon then proceeds to a 
gritty central passacaglia, while the finale which, according to Panton's 
annotation, Kubelik thinks of as ''life'' revisits earlier material and ends in 
a spirit of hard-won affirmation. His imaginative orchestration makes maximum 
use of low winds, brass and percussion (a varied and impressive line-up), 
whereas in the equally dramatic, 22-minute Cantata without Words - inspired by 
Lao Tse and the Bhagavad Gita - Kubelik's choral forces enter with Penderecki-
style glissandos. The disc's brightest component arrives last, with the 
Inventions and Interludes for children's choir, four oboes and four trumpets, 
composed in 1946 and providing a neo-classical contrast to the richly expressive 
neo-romanticism of its disc companions.

I played this CD three or four times, always with considerable pleasure. The 
temptation to insist on probable influences - which in this case include Berg, 
Martinu, Bartok, Janacek, Hindemith, Prokofiev, Roussel, Stravinsky, Ravel, 
Dvorak and Suk - seems to me particularly unhelpful in the case of a conductor, 
someone who is naturally expected to churn out 'Kapellmeister' music. Kubelik's 
work is certainly far more than that, with a range of sounds, motives and 
perspectives that bear witness to a particularly rich musical imagination, and 
if a tendency to discursiveness sometimes blurs structural contours, then 
atmosphere and emotion invariably provide compensation. The composer's 
performances are predictably sympathetic, while the recordings (Munich, 1981-4; 
Prague, 1990) are more than adequate.