HANS GAL: The Two Violin Sonatas; Suite for Violin and Piano – Annette-Barbara Vogel, violin/ Juhani Lagerspetz, piano – Avie AV2182, 61:12 *** [Distrib. by Forte]:
Hans Gal (1890-1987) grew up in the Vienna of the early Twentieth Century, surrounded by the diverse musical world of Mahler, Korngold, Berg, Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. He chose to compose music that was of the Austrian tradition: melodic themes, traditional musical forms, polyphonic textures seasoned with “the harmonic complexity and advanced tonality of pre-serial modernism,” as program annotator Eva Fox Gal noted. By the age of 15, Gal won the Austrian State Prize for Composition, and, after the First World War intervened, his opera, Die Heilige Ente, was performed by seven opera houses in Europe. In 1929, he was appointed Director of the Conservatoire in Mainz where he stayed until his ouster when the Nazi’s took over in 1933. He fled to Vienna and then to Scotland, where he was interned as an ‘enemy alien’ until the end of the Second World War. He remained in Edinburgh as a scholar and teacher until his death in 1987.
The Sonata for Violin and Piano, (1920) is dramatically powerful and operatically expressive, evoking the memory of the dominance of Austria in the European arts world before the First World War. It’s rhapsodic, romantically nostalgic, and, in the Scherzo, eerie and macabre. It’s a serious and mellifluent piece. The last two works on this disc are more lighthearted, even though they were composed under extreme duress of life in Third Reich-dominated Vienna. For Gal, composition became a refuge, “I actually had no other goal other than to free my soul from something that left me no peace..,” he wrote. The Suite for Violin and Piano of 1935 is brighter and more playful, even classical in its structure and texture. The Sonata for violin and piano of 1933 is both lyrically graceful and musically sophisticated, especially in the development section of the first movement. A chaotic scherzo is followed by a two part finale – a profoundly sad Largo and a vigorous Allegro.
Violinist Annette-Barbara Vogel and pianist Juhani Lagerspetz perform the many moods of these works with fervor and commitment. If you’re looking for a disc of beautiful late Romantic music for violin and piano, this CD is an excellent choice.
— Robert Moon
