WEILL: Berliner Requiem; Vom Tod im Wald; HINDEMITH: Der Tod; STRAVINSKY: Octet; MILHAUD: Cantate de la Guerre; Cantate de la Paix – I Solisti del Vento/ Flemish Radio Choir/ Paul Hillier, conductor – Glossa

WEILL: Berliner Requiem; Vom Tod im Wald; HINDEMITH: Der Tod; STRAVINSKY: Octet; MILHAUD: Cantate de la Guerre; Cantate de la Paix – I Solisti del Vento/ Flemish Radio Choir/ Paul Hillier, conductor – Glossa multichannel SACD 922207, 66:57 [Distr. by Naxos] *****:
This is not your grandmother’s requiem—this is an intense, 1920s social commentary that is a bleak pessimistic look at death through the eyes of living people, sort of Threepenny Opera meets post-romantic Gebrauchsmusik, that Hindemith-coined term that refers the entire service of art to the needs of the people. The great movements of world socialism were just getting underway at this time, with its cousin Fascism brewing in Germany while the young Adolph Hitler got his sea legs in early speeches. This is bare-boned, post and pre-apocalypse music devoid of moral character and caught between two gigantic wars. The opening lines sum up the whole thing: “Praise to the night and the darkness that thickly surrounds you!”
This piece has a sort of haunting beauty about it that takes the world as it stood in that time—and maybe has recurred in our own—and tries, perhaps in futility and certainly in vanity, to give the common man some sort of hope in his situation, and to memorialize the deaths of so many millions. It also serves a dual purpose in that it pays tribute to the death of the noted pacifist Rosa Luxemburg. Vom Tod im Wald (“Of Death in the Wood”) was originally part of the Berliner Requiem but Weill dropped the music out of concern that its theme, basically a paean to the animal world, didn’t quite fit with the rest of Brecht’s texts.
Hindemith’s odd piece, Death, would not seem to be a particular draw listed on a concert program. But its wider significance is the further nail in the coffin of romanticism, in the wake of WWI and the failed dreams of the Weimar Republic. Curiously enough though, even Hindemith could not escape the harmonic confines of romanticism just yet, and his tonal ambiguities, though still tonality-centered, play right into the hands of the post-romantics in this eerily-comforting work for men’s chorus.
Continuing on the theme of post-WWI we turn to the father of neo-classicism and the rejection of overt pathos in music, Stravinsky. His Octet got a tepid response from public and critics, shocking after the great and colorful ballets and reduced to chamber-sized dimensions, though the clarity provided in this now-famous and easily-accepted piece acceded to the ideas already being promulgated in Paris to the point of complete rejection of German romanticism. It was not appreciated at the time, but certainly opened the door to a world of new ideas.
Darius Milhaud wrote his Cantata of War and Cantata of Peace between 1937 and 1940, with texts by Paul Claudel. Milhaud was concerned of course with the idea of “objectivity”, as if any composer could remove him or she from direct emotional commentary on any music composed. But Milhaud sought refuge in the halls of polytonality to try and remove any sense of grounded-ness on the forms of the past, and while he may have succeeded in his own eyes and perhaps those of his contemporaries, we now perceive the beauties of his system as just another variant on the basic earthiness of the tonal system. Both of these pieces are quite lovely and affecting, with both War and Peace operating in similar modes of comfort and persuasiveness.
Anything by Paul Hillier is almost guaranteed to be a winner, and this is no exception. I was a little leery about how well the program fits, but it does amazingly well. My one concern might be the Octet—I have heard more energetic readings than this, but it is stilled played very well, and the SACD surround sound serves each piece to full auditory capacity. Very much recommended.
— Steven Ritter