Wand conducts Koechlin - Les Bandar-log, Op. 176, after Kipling's "The Jungle Book" (1939)

Les Bandar-log, Op. 176 - Symphonic poem after the Rudyard Kipling cycle "The Jungle Book" (1939) In this 1973 recording, the late German conductor Günter Wand leads the Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester in a performance of "Les Bandar-log" by the prolific French composer Charles Koechlin (1867-1950). Koechlin was fascinated with Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book", and he composed a cycle of orchestral works based on it. This tone poem is the last composition in the Jungle Book cycle, but it is not merely a depiction of the langur monkeys which Kipling calls the "Bandar-log"; the work is also a scathing parody of the world of contemporary music, including twelve-tone and atonal music. Koechlin made the following analogy with regard to the apes in "Les Bandar-log": "They think themselves creative geniuses, but are really nothing more than vulgar copyists whose only interest is to adopt to the fashion of the day. It is said that there is also something of the kind in the world of the artist."