J. DAVID Symphonies Nos. 1 and 6 • Johannes Wildner, cond; ORF RSO Vienna • CPO 777 741-2 (59:54)

Johann Nepomuk David (1895—1977) is one of those obscure composers that CPO seems to unearth with surprising regularity. Known during his lifetime as a pianist and conductor––notably of Bruckner––he worked mainly in the cities of Linz and Leipzig. His main love was the music of J. S. Bach; he studied Bach’s counterpoint in depth, and this influence completely permeates his music (or at least the music on this disc). Both symphonies are in four movements. The First made its appearance in 1937, while the Sixth was composed in 1954 and underwent two major revisions before reaching its final form in 1966.


The way David has taken Bachian counterpoint as a model is unusual in a symphonic context. This is neither straightforward pastiche nor a “wrong note” Neoclassical statement. Rather, the composer lets loose a stream of close-knit imitative polyphony, often in three parts or more, which then seems to run along, driven by its own momentum, until the contrapuntal lines collide into a cadence. Every movement works this way, even the Andante sostenuto of the First Symphony and the Adagio of the Sixth, though the fast movements benefit most from David’s distinctive approach. Springing from the simplest motifs, each of these symphonic movements could be described as “monothematic,” a term coined by the composer himself. If it all sounds dry and academic, the results are anything but. According to Bernhard A. Kohl’s helpful notes, David once proclaimed, “If music fails to reach an audience, it is not alive.” The surface of this music is colorful and attractive, while the relentless contrapuntal energy gives it real substance and, in such movements as the Sixth’s Adagio , “spirituality” (as Kohl puts it).


David’s use of instruments adds another layer of interest; on this evidence he was a clear and lucid orchestrator. The First Symphony features solo woodwinds and strings primarily, while the Sixth is marked by the use of brass and percussion to punctuate important moments. An interesting example is the recurring snare drum figures (also xylophone rattles) in the third movement: This lumbering dance, titled “Wiener Waltzer,” indicates through its scoring and harmony the composer’s acquaintance with Mahler and the Schoenberg school. At times the orchestral fabric suggests Alban Berg, albeit with a lighter touch.


Wildner and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra’s performances are very good, encompassing both the delicacy of the First’s playful passages and the weight of the climactic surges in No. 6. The sound balance helps to keep David’s thematic strands clear and separate at every dynamic level.


Once again CPO puts us in their debt. There are nine other symphonies by this composer (three of them, including a symphony for strings, are unnumbered), plus three violin concertos and concertos for flute and organ. I sincerely hope this issue marks the beginning of a David revival.


FANFARE: Phillip Scott

-----

Johann Nepomuk David (1895-1977) was a German/Austrian symphonist in the neoclassical style of Hindemith, although he sounds quite different. His music is buoyantly contrapuntal and rhythmically muscular, but far less aggressive than that of his contemporary, as well as less harmonically acerbic. It freely mixes modal and more modern, dissonant harmony, even flirting with twelve-tone melodies now and again, but the music’s linearity, textural balance and clarity always maintain a firm sense of direction, with each movement coming to a punctual and satisfying end without a shred of bombast or rhetorical excess.

David was not terribly original for his period (the First Symphony dates from the late 1930s, the Sixth from 1954/66). The booklet notes speak of him within the German symphonic tradition as if the rest of the world, and the attendant advances in symphonic writing already realized in Scandinavia (Sibelius and Nielsen), England (Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Bax), France (Roussel, Magnard, Stravinsky), and elsewhere had never happened. Perhaps David was unaware of them, or didn’t care, but I doubt it. He was a big fan of Bruckner, and knew his Mahler too. Still, this is really good music: confident, beautifully crafted, and distinctive enough to deserve exploration.

You can tell from the magnificent opening paragraph of the First Symphony that David is a real symphonist, in control of the long line of thematic development. The work is scored for standard forces, with harp and extremely discreet but telling use of glockenspiel, triangle, and suspended cymbals. Unlike some of Hindemith’s later pieces, the rhythms remain fresh and fluent throughout. The music dances. The third movement of the more amply scored Sixth Symphony, for example, is a Viennese waltz, distorted through an almost Mahlerian lens, but the structure of the work overall recalls Hindemith’s Symphony in E Flat, with its brief preludial opening movement, elegiac Adagio, wicked scherzo, and substantial finale.

The performances here by Johannes Wildner and the Austrian radio orchestra sound remarkably assured. David’s contrapuntal style doesn’t give the players anywhere to hide, and they rise to the challenge with distinction. In busier passages, particularly where the strings are sailing along with intricate figurations at high pitch and volume in the Sixth Symphony, there are a few moments of temporary shakiness, but these aren’t terribly important. The music comes across well, and the performances are vividly engineered. This first disc in what I assume will be a new series is real find. Collectors take note.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday

Includes sonata(s) by Johann Philipp Krieger. Ensembles: Parnassi musici, Bavarian Chamber Orchestra Bad Brückenau members.

Classical Music

Following the release of Franz Reizenstein's Cello Concerto, it is now our pleasure to present to you his Piano Concerto No. 2. Like Berthold Goldschmidt, Reizenstein fled from Berlin to England in 1934, before the immigration laws had been tightened. Generally speaking, Hindemith's influence dominates in Reizenstein, though his effusive energy producing highly spirited and less sober results clearly distinguishes him from British and American composers like Rawsthorne and Berkeley. Reizenstein himself performed the solo part at the premiere of his Piano Concerto by the BBC Orchestra under Rudolf Schwarz in 1961. What stands out in this concerto is it's exuberant virtuosity, which produces brilliant interplay between the soloist and the orchestra. Reizenstein's Serenade in F numbers among the works adhering more closely to the "New Objectivity" emanating from Germany than to colorful impressionism. The last work heard here is the Cyrano de Bergerac concert overture - a powerful, energetic work and the symphonic portrait of an extremely popular stage figure working with a surprisingly modest orchestral ensemble. Here the composer in no way overlooks Cyrano's more romantic moments.

Leopold van der Pals wrote a total of three works in which he dealt with the concerto genre. His early music, including his Concert Piece op. 10, was composed in an unmistakably Romantic style, but even then van der Pals challenged harmonic structures and endeavored to submit them to further development. By contrast, his Piano Concerto op. 100 and the Concertino of 1937-38 from his later years attest to a composer who in the meantime had experienced enormous development. Broad Romantic gestures are no longer found in his music, which had become more concentrated with respect to thematic work, formal development, and performance length in individual compositions. The alternation between various musical characters as well as the various means employed in developmental work have expanded. Study of Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy led van der Pals to Goethe's idea of metamorphosis, which he then increasingly endeavored to incorporate into his music as a structural basis. The idea that an entire artistic complex can develop from a single seed became an increasingly important factor in his work process and led to entirely new approaches that continued to stamp his creative production through to his late oeuvre. In his late suite on the dramatic poem Monk Wanderer op. 84 the celestial spheres represent association with the physical world, freedom of the spirit, love, light, courage and strength, wisdom, and profound knowledge of the mystery.

Mozart was a young husband and would soon become a father when he was composing L'oca del Cairo and Lo sposo deluso, two operas destined to remain fragments. After the success of The Abduction from the Seraglio, he worked concurrently on these two new works. In L'oca del Cairo (The Goose of Cairo) a father locks his daughter in a tower to keep her away from her lover. After much confusion and mischief during which a large mechanical metal goose plays an important role, the father finally gives in. Mozart decided not to finish this opera because he did not like the libretto; after a number of sketches of the music - which, as always, is wonderful - for arias, duets, and the finale he stopped working on it. After all, he had a second opera project in the works, Lo sposo deluso (The Deluded Bridegroom). Three ladies - Emilia, Metilde, and Laurina - are rivals for Emilia's beloved, who is presumed to be dead but then resurfaces. After much confusion the idea was also to conclude this opera with a happy ending, but things never got that far. It remained an unfinished fragment and never made it's way to the stage.

Classical Music

In Berlin the composers Berthold Goldschmidt and Franz Reizenstein developed into products of the anti-romantic “new realism.” However, both distanced themselves from this dry objectivity and sought more powerful means of expression while avoiding the late romantic excesses that at the time continued to predominate in Germany. The surprising fact is that neither Reizenstein nor Goldschmidt felt drawn to Schonberg’s method of twelve-tone composition. In 1934 and 1935 both composers fled from Berlin to England, that is, prior to the tightening of immigration requirements. Influences from Reizenstein’s teachers Paul Hindemith and Ralph Vaughan Williams are audible in the rather harsh, expressionistic character of his concerto. Raphael Wallfisch writes of this work, “Reizenstein’s Cello Concerto is a tour de force for the cellist. What is involved here is an epic and heroic statement in which lyrical and dramatic elements alternate.”

WOLF-FERRARI Trittico. Arabesque on an Aria by Ettore Tito . Divertimento. Suite Veneziana • Ulf Schirmer, cond; Munich RO • CPO 777 567-2 (68:34)


For many years he was known only for his operas—and instrumental excerpts, at that; now Wolf-Ferrari’s non-operatic orchestral music is finally beginning to get a hearing. There’s a fair amount of it, too, mostly composed in the last two decades of his life. The four works on this album were all written between 1935 and 1937, all around the premiere of his opera Il campiello, which occurred at La Scala in 1936.


There are no stylistic surprises for those familiar with Wolf-Ferrari’s operas, but the expressive range and technical accomplishment of these pieces display aspects of the composer that were infrequently revealed. For example, the Trittico ’s striking first movement features variations on a slow, unison chorale theme (titled “In excelsis” in the Italian edition), serene and monumental, while its second movement, “To the Dead Heroes,” is a gloomy but powerful two-part threnody with curious chromatic side slips reminiscent of Reger. The Divertimento is to all intents and purposes a chamber symphony in Wolf-Ferrari’s 18th-century manner, reminiscent of his much earlier Le donne curiose, I quatro rusteghi, and Il segreto di Susanna , but the Arabesque on an Aria by Ettore Tito (a 20th-century Italian painter, rather than composer) concludes with a lengthy and elaborate fugue that is both academically correct and quirkily individual. The four-movement Suite Veneziana stands at a great distance from the usual musical picture-postcards of the canal-based city, with hints of popular melodic forms and rhythms turned autumnal, spectral, or threatening. Even the final section, “Festive Morning,” is more of a phantasmal serenade than anything else.


There’s little to criticize in Ulf Schirmer’s conducting or the Munich Radio Orchestra’s performances on this disc. I could wish for a bit more personal character in solo passages, but there’s a fine blend between the sections, and a technical polish that never fails. The only competition comes from the Oviedo Philharmonic under Friedrich Haider, on a disc that Paul Orgel thoroughly enjoyed ( Fanfare 33:6). Haider typically takes slightly faster tempos, and emphasizes rhythms a bit more, while Schirmer lingers over colors and chromaticism, preferring a more relaxed pace. The differences are greater than one might think in this often emotionally ambiguous music, with Haider seeing more of the light, Schirmer more of the shade, in these compositions.


If I were asked to choose between the two albums, frankly, I wouldn’t. Haider supplies more music—he adds four of those brief operatic instrumentals I alluded to at the start of this review—but Schirmer finds more depth in the Trittico and Suite Veneziana without ever becoming ponderous. One thing’s for certain: There’s much here to enjoy from a composer too often seen as little more than a pastiche artist.


FANFARE: Barry Brenesal


----------

Much of this music appeared on a recent disc on the PhilArtis label. Those performances were serviceable, but there's no question that the music makes a much more positive impression on this release. As I mentioned in connection with that previous issue, there are some wonderful moments here: the ecstatic first movement of Trittico, and the finale of the Suite, which sounds like it wandered in from Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin. All of the music is pretty, to be sure, but it would be difficult to say that these are anything but slight works of a composer who devoted his main attention to opera. Still, Ulf Schirmer and his Munich players deliver performances of much greater incisiveness and polish than their predecessors, and so if you're curious about this composer's non-operatic music, this very well recorded disc represents your best bet.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) was the fifth child of great composer Johann Sebastian Bach. He was an important composer in the transitional time between the Baroque and Classical periods. These pieces were composed by CPE Bach for the annual meeting of the Captains of the Hamburg Citizens Guard. Composing for this meeting was an honor, and only the most sought-after composers were commissioned. Each year the commissioned composer would compose an oratorio and a cantata. Here, we have CPE Bach’s Oratorio Hebt an, ihr Chore der Freuden, and his Serenata Der Trommeln Schlag, der Pfeifen Spiel.

PEJA?EVI? Piano Trio in C. Cello Sonata in e • Andrej Bielow (vn); Christian Poltéra (vc); Oliver Triendl (pn) • CPO 777419 (63:57)


Cpo is not a label to shrink from sticking its corporate neck out. Having dug up a symphony and concerted piano work by the heretofore practically anonymous Dora Peja?evi? (1885–1923) for a recording I reviewed only in the last issue (and selected for my 2010 Want List), the German record company has immediately followed it up with a piano trio and cello sonata by this virtually unknown Croatian female composer. I won’t repeat her biography here since it was just given in Fanfare 35:2


According to Koraljka Kos’s program note, Peja?evi? wrote two piano trios, the first in D Major in 1905 as a young woman of 20, and a second not much later in 1910. It’s the later C-Major work that’s presented on the current disc. Though the piece is a substantial 35 minutes and laid out in four ample movements, with the Scherzo in second place, it’s the third movement that makes the work a bit unusual. In place of the expected A-B-A (song form) or sonata-form slow movement, what we get is a closed or circular rondo-sonata with two digressive episodes—A-B-A-C-A-B 1 -A—in which the second episode (C) functions as a development section and the return of the first episode (B 1 ) resolves the key conflict, returning to E Major (the first occurrence of B being in C?-Minor).


Except for the difference in key relationships, this is the exact same formal layout we find in the last movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and countless other rondo-sonata movements. What makes Peja?evi?’s rondo-sonata different is that usually such movements come last and they are typically in a fast tempo. This example is doubly atypical in that not only does it occur in place of a normal slow movement, but the rondo theme itself (ordinarily fast) is marked Lento , while the digressive episodes are Allegretto (B and B 1 ) and Allegro (C). This suggests to me that Peja?evi? was very much her own woman, despite the fact that her musical vocabulary and the stylistic ends to which she applied it are démodé for their time.


Formal aspects aside, Peja?evi?’s trio is, in my opinion, a major addition to the piano trio literature. The first movement, in particular, is absolutely gorgeous, though hard to describe in terms of influences and possible models. A truly memorable melodic thread weaves its way nonstop through the movement in a way that’s a bit reminiscent of Schumann, but there’s also a fluid feeling to the writing that has a French accent about it. Fauré or Reynaldo Hahn, perhaps?


It was Mendelssohn of course who established the paradigm for a certain type of Scherzo—the elfentanz —so it’s not unexpected that many composers modeled their scherzo movements after his. Peja?evi? pays her respects to Mendelssohn as well, but in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, for her Scherzo is an aerobics class full of huffing and puffing middle-aged women in spandex sweats exercising to a Jewish hora. In the sudden rhythmic spills and tumbles, you can hear one or another of the women get out of step, lose her footing, and take a pratfall; and in the moaning and groaning harmonic gear shifts, you can hear the kvetching of “oy veh, it hurts.” This is really funny music. But the real surprise is the central trio section. It’s time for a sit-down and a Perrier sprizter. The French accent returns, at first sounding almost like something by Debussy, but rapidly transforming into the most beautiful salon music you can imagine. Once again, Hahn comes to mind, or if we’re sticking with women composers, perhaps Cécile Chaminade or Marie Jaëll, both of whom were born a generation earlier than Peja?evi? but outlived her, in Chaminade’s case by more than 20 years.


The third movement, the form of which has already been discussed, sets the tone with an outpouring of effusive romantic song—that’s the Rondo theme—but the intervening episodes are too brief and don’t offer sufficient contrast to really articulate the structure. It’s all very pretty, but in the end, it sounds more like a single idea being spun out and elaborated upon than it does a movement constructed of distinct divisions. This, I think, is the weakest movement of Peja?evi?’s trio. The finale returns to the flowing melodic ease of the first movement. Here the Schumann influence feels even stronger than it did in the first movement.


If nothing else is said of Peja?evi?, it has to be acknowledged that she was generously blessed with the gift for melody, and her E-Minor Cello Sonata, composed in 1913 and revised in 1915, gives ample evidence of it. Opening with a striking cantabile theme vaguely reminiscent of Brahms, the cello sings continuously throughout the first movement, engaging the piano in a tightly woven uninterrupted contrapuntal conversation.


The Scherzo once again sounds a distant echo of Mendelssohn, but one that is as different from his scherzo movements as it is from Peja?evi?’s Scherzo in the piano trio. Here in the sonata the music takes on a slightly sinister character, its drumming figure calling to mind the hammering of Alberich’s dwarfs forging gold in the cavernous depths of Nibelheim. Peja?evi?’s music isn’t nearly as persistent or menacing as that, but it’s definitely a Scherzo with a warty face and a hump on its back.


The third-movement Adagio shares with the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony the unusual meter of 5/4, but Peja?evi?’s music is no offbeat waltz. Rather, it’s a melancholy Russian-sounding movement that bears a passing resemblance to Tchaikovksy’s Piano Trio in A Minor. The finale, marked Allegro comodo , may be “comfortable” in its breezy, easygoing manner, which largely echoes the character of the first movement, but I doubt that it’s a breeze for the cellist. Much of it sounds quite technically challenging. As with the piano trio, I believe the sonata is an important and very beautiful addition to the cello repertoire.


Two of the three artists here are known quantities, having partnered with each other as well as with others on numerous recordings. They are, of course, cellist Christian Poltéra and pianist Oliver Triendl, and, as always they are in top form and a real pleasure to hear. I wasn’t familiar with violinist Andrej Bielow when I received this release, but I’ve since learned that he is a relatively young Ukrainian who studied and settled in Germany, has soloed with a number of orchestras, and since 2005 has led the Szymanowski Quartet. He brings a great deal of warmth, not to mention technical skill and poise, to Peja?evi?’s piano trio.


Maybe it’s just because I’m such a chamber-music maven, but if I found myself ever so slightly cautious in reviewing Peja?evi?’s symphony in the previous issue, I have no reservations regarding her piano trio and cello sonata on the present disc. This is music one can love and live with forever. The recording receives my highest commendation along with a plea to cpo for as much more Peja?evi? as the company can possibly bring to light.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Rosenmueller’s 1682 sonatas, although written after he returned to Germany, clearly show the fruits of the nearly 25 years he spent in Venice. To quote the scholar Wollny, “Thanks to his great fame and good connections to German courts, Rosenmueller’s music had a truly formative stylistic impact on German music.”

When the symphonic poem The Raven after Edgar Allan Poe celebrated it's premiere in London in March, 1900, the critics showered hymns of praise on his work so rich in unique orchestral colors and on it's young composer Josef Holbrooke. It brought him his breakthrough and firmly established his reputation as an innovative and original contemporary composer. There are certainly many settings of Poe's poem, but Holbrooke was the first composer who did not merely set the text but used it as the poetic basis for his first "Poem for Orchestra." Holbrooke's idiom was the musical language of the late nineteenth century obliged to the primacy of expression, and he enriched it with his constant quest for new tonal effects. In his orchestral variations on the beloved Scottish folk song "Auld Lang Syne" he again displays his extraordinary gift for employing his absolutely inexhaustible inventive talent and fine feeling for harmony in order to endow simple song forms with subtle expressive variety.

Gradually and fortunately, for some years now the extensive and highly significant oeuvre of the Polish-Russian composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg has also been discovered and recognized in the West – a process also documented on our internationally highly regarded cpo recordings. During the 1960s Weinberg’s reputation was not only restored but also soared on high – at least in the Soviet Union. Interpreters of the rank of Rostropovich, Gilels, Kondrashin, Leonid Kogan, and the Borodin Quartet joined David Oistrach in his enthusiastic propagation of Weinberg’s music. The Symphony No. 10 is the most stylistically advanced and experimental composition among his purely instrumental works. In conjunction with her research on Dmitri Shostakovich’s life, the Polish violinist and composer Evelina Novicka’s attention was also drawn to the composer Weinberg. Impressed by his compositions, she has recorded several premieres of his works, including the Concertino op. 42 and Rhapsody op. 47 heard on this most recent CD. She herself has arranged the lost version of the Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes for violin and orchestra. - cpo (Translated from German text.)

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.