“Two Roads to Exile” = ADOLF BUSCH: String Sextet in G Major, Op. 40; WALTER BRAUNFELS: String Quintet in F-sharp Minor, Op. 63 – Marie Bérard and Benjamin Bowman, violins / Steven Dann and Carolyn Blackwell, violas / Bryan Epperson and David Hetherington, cellos – RCA Red Seal 88697 64490 2, 66:02 ****:
This disc explores the work of two composers who suffered from and coped with two different sources of exile as a result of the fascist regime in wartime Germany. For Adolf Busch, the exile involved leaving his native country. Though Busch was a German of the kind of pure Aryan stock that Hitler held up as the ideal of the Third Reich (he called Busch “our German violinist”), he was a cosmopolite who included among his friends and colleagues a number of Jewish musicians, including Rudolf Serkin, who married his daughter. When the Nazis rose to power in 1933, Busch decided he couldn’t continue to live under such a patently anti-Semitic regime and so emigrated first to Basel and then, when war finally came, to the United States.
Although today Busch is known primarily as a performer, lead violinist of the famed Busch Quartet, in the 20s and 30s he was equally in demand as a composer, and his orchestral works were performed by the likes of Toscanini and Furtwängler. His Sextet appeared in 1928, being extensively revised the year Hitler came to power.
For Walter Braunfels, exile was a different matter. Half Jewish though a practicing Catholic, Braunfels lost his position at the Cologne Hochschule für Musik when Hitler acceded to the chancellorship. Unable to bring himself to leave his native country, in 1937 he withdrew to the rural town of Überlingen, where he lived in what he called “internal exile,” under the constant threat of deportation. As consolation, he continued to compose with little hope of immediate performance. For the first time in his career Braunfels turned to chamber music, penning his Sextet in 1945.
In notes to this recording, Simon Wynberg makes an interesting point: “the most successful route to damning these composers was to elide the Nazis’ musical conservatism with theirs and to suggest an artistic, and by implication, a political sympathy with the fascist regime. Conversely, the ‘new music’ that the Nazis would most certainly have labeled ‘degenerate’—the works of Liebowitz, Nono, Stockhausen and Boulez—defined their compositions as intrinsically worthy, regardless of their political stripe.” Interesting and if true, richly ironic. But after all, both Busch and Braunfels wrote in a kind of time warp. Braunfels’s Quintet sounds like what would have passed for new music in the Vienna or Budapest of 1900. In fact, its gently rocking, bucolic Rondo finale, easily the best movement in the work, reminds me of Dohnányi’s wonderful Serenade of 1902, though the harmonically more daring Scherzo forges ahead a bit—Zemlinsky, circa 1910, comes to mind.
The Busch Sextet is even more atavistic, sounding like very late, late Brahms. However, as a string player, Busch was conscious of advanced technical trends and so includes some modern touches such as eerie, buzzing tremolos and a snap pizzicato or two. For me, this is the more attractive of the two works. The second movement of the Quintet seems to drag and has very little to say. As an admirer of Bruckner, Braunfels appears to cultivate some of Bruckner’s stateliness but also more than a little of his stasis. At least Braunfels redeems himself in the last two movements, livelier and more memorable than the first two.
I’m not sure these works deserve a place in the repertoire as Wynberg suggests, but they certainly deserve an occasional hearing in the concert hall. At any rate, they get strong advocacy from members of the Artists of the Royal Conservatory (ARC). The ARC prides itself on bringing to light works that for one reason or another have been suppressed over the years; their earlier recording of music by Julius Röntgen has received universal praise. Fine intimate recorded sound courtesy of the RCA engineers and Koerner Hall at the Royal Conservatory, Toronto.
— Lee Passarella
