EDA 24, 74:24 **** [Distr. by Albany]:
This recital captures something of the creative atmosphere of Franz Schreker’s Viennese composition class, 1912-1993, at the Vienna Music Academy before the nightmare politics of National Socialism ended his career, which included his instruction at the Prussian Academy of the Arts. In his prime, Schreker could offer his pupils something rare: access to the publisher Universal Edition, which meant almost immediate dissemination of their oeuvre. The tide turned in 1933: along with the scathing criticism of Theodor Adorno, the Nazi and post-war censorship of much of the music produced–admittedly by composers of Jewish ethnicity–did not find rediscovery until the 1980s, when musicologists, if not practicing musicians, began to explore the “redemptive” possibilities of this body of work. Alone among these artists Berthold Goldschmidt enjoyed a degree of renewed prestige while he lived; the others perished in obscurity.
The “typical” trend of the music on this CD is relatively conservative: established forms of music cast within bounds–albeit experimental–of traditional tonality. Certainly the spirit of Hindemith looms as nigh as does the work of Schumann, Beethoven, Brahms, and Franck. The majestic opening work by Wilhelm Grosz (c. 1920), lasting thirty minutes, falls into four distinct sections, highly colorist and alternately thickly romantic (usually in C-sharp Minor) and playful in the manner of brilliant scherzi. The influence of bluesy jazz makes its presence known, but the tenor of the work corresponds to another Op. 9, that of Johannes Brahms, who offered us variants on Schumann’s themes. A gloomy canon enters the piece late in the fourth movement, already redolent with quote from Grosz’s own songs, Op. 3, inspired by Hans Bethge, he who translated Chinese poetry for Mahler’s setting of The Song of the Earth.
The little Capriccio by Berthold Goldschmidt (1903-1996) was composed in 1927 for pianist Zdenka Ticharich (1900-1979). A witty, angular bit of Hungarian virtuosity, the piece likes to jar us with jazzy syncopes and metric surprises, so that its F Minor does not always rest comfortably. Ticharich herself offers her own percussive, toccata-like Suite from 1927, only recently recovered into the repertoire in 1995. A fervent advocate of Debussy, Ravel, and Roussel, Ticharich retains the compulsion to classicism with her four movements, of which the opening Praeludium resonates with percussive aspects we hear as well in Stravinsky and Satie. The Scherzo-Valse invokes Chabrier, playful, modally angular, sarcastic, and touched by sentimentality. The step-wise and meditative Notturno caters to a bit of gothic romance, though its syntax pays debts to The Children’s Corner. The last movement Finale nods to Bartok, but no less to the French side of orientalism and Debussy’s Images.
Lithuanian (and gentile) composer Vladas Jakubenas (1903-1976) studied with Schreker 1928-1932. Heavily influenced by Scriabin, Rachmaninov, and the Russian school of color, the Two Tone-Pictures. Op. 2 (1927) appear as post-Romantic moments of nostalgia and pianistic charm, particularly the first, From the Fairyland. We might easily construe the piece as a forgotten melody of Medtner. The second piece, Legend, speaks in shifting harmonies typical of Schreker’s own angst with traditional tonality. The Op. 1 Rhapsody looks to Brahms and Bartok, the latter of whom shares an Opus 1 Rhapsody. Oriental scales, modal harmonies, and a gently pulsating opening section yield to a more frenetic, broken-passage series of figures, another toccata in a post-Romantic vein. The da capo returns to the glistening ripples of that link Schreker to aspects of Ravel, here in a Lithuanian spirit.
Kurt Fiebig (1908-1988) plainly absorbed Bach’s Lutheran chorales into his own musical personality, here (1949) expressed as a polyphonic moment of solemnity (in the prelude) that breaks out into a rollicking toccata in the fugue. Erratic, snidely witty, the piece is another “cat’s fugue” for light fingers and deft metric ears, occasionally transforming the fugue into something not quite Iberian, but not quite Bach, either. Finally, music by Alexander Ecklebe (1904-1983), his Metamorphoses (1971) on themes by Schreker that had long passed into musical storage. Even Ecklebe’s work had to be resurrected by pianist Lessing from an unpublished manuscript. The tune derives from Schreker’s opera The Singing Devil (1928), a deliberately archaic piece that invokes the same scholasticism we hear in Palestrina by Pfitzner and Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler. Like Hindemith, Ecklebe has a full range of classical procedures at his disposal, the surfaces alternately sparkling and then achieving a contrapuntal, viscous depth reminiscent of Koechlin and Schreker’s own style prior to the advent of the Weimar Republic.
An intriguing, musically adventurous tour of an era too often consigned to the darkness, but here brought into a most compassionate light by a gifted pianist.
–Gary Lemco
