Kolja Lessing, the tireless proponent of 20th-century composers who fell victim to totalitarianism and racial fanaticism, can be experienced in an impressive union of pianist, violist, violinist, musicologist, and author on this first (and, as of yet, only) portrait CD dedicated exclusively to the works of Franz Reizenstein. Reizenstein, born in 1911 in Nuremberg, the city that saw the enactment of Hitler’s racial laws in 1935, which paved the way to the subsequent systematic persecution of Jews in Europe, is known to insiders as a composer of humoristic compositions for Gerard Hoffnung’s legendary concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall in the 1950s, such as the Concerto Popolare (“The Piano Concerto to end all Piano Concertos”) and Let’s Fake an Opera. Like Reizenstein, Goldschmidt, Wellesz, Gál, and others, Hoffnung, a musician and caricaturist born in Berlin, belonged to the group of German and Austrian artists of Jewish descent, who survived the Third Reich in England, and whose place of exile became their new homeland. Reizenstein, who studied in Berlin with Paul Hindemith and Leonid Kreuzer, had already emigrated to England in 1934, where he resumed his studies at the Royal College of Music under the likes of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Solomon. Reizenstein dedicated his entire life to the aesthetics of Hindemith, who was a great inspiration to him with his re-invention of tonality in conjunction with his mastery of counterpoint, as well as his practical knowledge of virtually all instruments.

Hans Krása’s children's opera “Brundibár” has now come to be known throughout the world as a synonym for the music of Terezín, the ghetto in Northern Bohemia which gained its tragic fame as a “model concentration camp” in the 1940s by becoming an involuntary residence for Jewish intelligencia and countless Jewish artists deported by the Nazis (above all composers and musicians). The camp administration organised “recreational activities” to create a mock reality of Potemkin proportions for the international public, which became much, much more for the imprisoned participants in the regular concerts, presentations and theatre and opera performances: a recipe for survival. But the masks and curtains fell after the inglorious visit from the Red Cross in the autumn of 1944, which concluded in the presentation of several scenes from Brundibár: hundreds of artists were sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, including the last cast of the children’s opera Brundibár, which by that time had put on no fewer than 55 performances in Terezín. Its creator Hans Krása arrived at the camp in 1943. Conductor Rafael Schächter, who was also interred there, succeeded in smuggling in Krása’s piano score from the opera (which had already been composed in Prague in 1938), and Krása proceeded to write a new full score for it. In this recording, eda records presented this Terezín version of this most magical children’s opera of the 20th century for the first time in German; it was accompanied by a radio feature by Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick, in which the author recounts the biography of this musical gem and the life stories of several of its protagonists through the voices of contemporary witnesses.

Franz Schreker (1878–1934) and Ernst Toch (1887–1964), two of the most important and successful Austrian composers of their generations, ranked among the most prominent victims of National Socialist cultural policy after Hitler’s seizure power in 1933. The works which can be heard on this CD in world premiere recordings mark high points in dance history after the turn of the century and in the 1920s, respectively. Schreker’s Geburtstag der Infantin, written in 1908 on commission from the Klimtsche Kunstschau, is not only a key piece within the context of the secession movement in its new understanding of the Gesamtkunstwerk – it also marks the birth of expressive dance (Ausdruckstanz), as developed by the Wiesenthal sisters in their shedding of the rigid corset of classical ballet in Vienna. The success of Geburtstag der Infantin, which was hailed as an epochal event, confirmed not only Schreker’s position in the Viennese music scene, it also led to a libretto commission from Alexander von Zemlinsky, who wanted Wilde’s fin de siècle version of the beauty and the beast transferred into a modern “tragedy of the ugly man.” Schreker ended up composing it himself with Die Gezeichneten, which cemented his fame once and for all after the legendary debut of Der ferne Klang in Frankfurt am Main in 1912. The score of the original performance version of Geburtstag der Infantin, which was only rediscovered in the 1980s, underwent a reworking by Schreker for a production at the Berlin Staatsoper – in which several parts (such as the scene with the dwarf before the mirror) had been omitted. Ernst Toch’s Tanzsuite was premiered in Mannheim in 1923 – the same year as the revised version of Schreker’s Pantomime in Berlin. Paul Breisach, a student of Schreker’s, conducted the production by the choreographer Frieda Back. Her teacher Mary Wigman is the link in a fascinating trail which led back to Schreker and the Wiesenthals, since the impression that the Geburtstag der Infantin made on Wigman in 1908 in Vienna inspired her to become a dancer. This production not only promises exciting listening enjoyment, but also fascinating insight into the lines long which expressive dance developed over three generations from Jugendstil to expressionism and all the way to the era of Neue Sachlichkeit. This production marked the beginning of eda record’s cooperation with the Berlin Kammersymphonie and its artistic director Jurgen Bruns, a cooperation encompassing recordings of works by Berthold Goldschmidt, Roberto Gerhard, and Kurt Weill, three composers forged in Berlin in the master-classes of Schoenberg, Schreker, and Busoni (eda 18), as well as the first volume of the “Poland Abroad” series, with works by Mieczysław Karłowicz, Alexandre Tansman, Jerzy Fitelberg, and Simon Laks (eda 26).

It was Europe’s culture capitals in the first half of the 20th century where “the music played” – in the truest sense. Places which were tied in with connections which enriched a music scene that extended beyond the boundaries of nationalities, schools and styles, a scene which tolerated virtually anything, made many things possible, and allowed some things to come to life in the first place. On one hand stood the awakening national consciousness, a political phenomenon carried out between restoration and social (if not socialist) departures in new directions. On the other hand, the bursting of the borders of tonality, the function of harmony, and the guiderails of classical/romantic canon of form shook the foundations of musical history, which up to that point had continued to progress in a linear fashion. Vienna was one of the much-described melting pots of this era. This recording is a striking piece of evidence of the diverse forms of compositional expression which were allowed to coexist with one another – and at what extreme levels. It demonstrates the courage and self-confidence of composers, no matter whether they (from our present-day perspective) looked back over their shoulders or cast their gaze far into the future. In the 1920s, Hans Gál was one of Austria’s most famous composers; his stylistic tightrope walk between Viennese elegance, late Romanticism’s continued exhaustion of the tonal palette and the perfect command over classical structures is enjoying a late renaissance. The slow movement of Ernst Křenek’s Violin Sonata Op. 3 opens a coherent, forceful musical universe to the listener. Its wealth of musical ideas points right at the roots of this fellow 20th century composer’s creativity. And at the same time, it demonstrates the abundance of his inventive capacity, which was not to diminish until many decades later. Egon Kornauth’s influence from the late Romantic period is unmistakeable, and listeners will never fail to be impressed by his melodic lines and the joy he takes in the expression of classical form. These are “Connections” which were made in an epoch in which the musical determinism of the post-war era had not yet arisen and composers could still enjoy writing music purely for the sake of fine art.

eda records has been devoting special attention to the composer Simon (Polish: Szymon) Laks for several years now. World-premiere recordings of his works run through the entire “Poland Abroad” series (eda 26, 27, 34, 35, and 37), some of his vocal compositions can be found on the CD “Elegy for the Jewish Villages” (eda 30), while the present production is dedicated entirely to him as an homage. Born in 1901 in Warsaw, Laks belonged to a group of Polish musicians and composers who banded together in Paris in the late 1920s as the “Association des Jeunes Musiciens Polonais.” Under the stewardship of Paderewski, Szymanowski, Arthur Rubinstein, and Nadia Boulanger, it was considered the most important non-French music association in what was then the music capital of the world. Laks, who had studied at the University of Warsaw and the Conservatoire in Paris, began his auspicious career as a composer in the early 1930s. He composed for famous ensembles such as the Roth Quartet and renowned soloists such as Maurice Maréchal and Vlado Perlemuter. Laks’s Jewish background led to his internment in 1941 and deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he led one of the camp’s orchestras – and narrowly survived the Shoah “after an endless series of wonders.” Music of Another World, a book he wrote after the war, is one of the most important documents of the role of the music in the Nazi extermination camps. This CD presents a collection of world-premiere recordings of Laks’s works from the pre-war era that marked his breakthrough into the French music scene. It also includes his ballad, Hommage à Chopin, which he composed in 1949, commissioned by the Chopin competition in Warsaw, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the great composer’s death. These recordings present a composer who succeeded in creating a highly original synthesis of Slavic and French elements of style. His aesthetic position is the milieu of the École de Paris among composers such as Martinů and Mihalovici, and in particular Tansman, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. Vladimir Stoupel, Judith Ingolfsson, and Leonid Gorokhov are outspoken and enthusiastic advocates of Laks’s witty yet enigmatic compositions. The eda records catalogue also presents Vladimir Stoupel performing a piano recital, The Life of the Machines (eda 28), with pieces by Antheil, Mossolow, Roslavets, Nancarrow, and Szpilman, as well as with Valéry Suty in the production Elegy for the Jewish Villages, with songs by Laks, Ullmann, Ravel, and Weissgall.

The history of the 20th century was shaped to an extreme degree by ideological, political and racial barriers that hindered the arts from developing freely. Many artists were forced to emigrate, while others perished in death camps. Those who remained and survived were often cut off from the outside world, forced to adjust, or were silenced into submission. And this was by no means restricted to individual names: entire groups of artists and genres of art were eradicated and are no longer present in cultural life. With its series “Across Boundaries – Discovering Russia 1910–1940,” eda records seeks to bridge one such a gap in music history. It presents world premiere recordings of works by Russian composers who were part of the generation of Prokofiev and Shostakovich and who made major contributions to Russian music in the 1910s and 1920s. The reason why they were banished and suppressed: their Jewish ethnic background and refusal to accept the dictated “socialist realism.” While the first two volumes of the “Across Boundaries” series were either dedicated to formal aspects (eda 12) or religious and social sources of inspiration (eda 14), Volume 3 gathers a wide spectrum of genres and aesthetic approaches, highlighting not only the influence that composers from the Baroque to late romanticism had on the Russian Jewish avant-garde, but also Jewish and Latin America folk music traditions as well as aspects of modern popular music. “Waiting Room,” the motto of the third volume of the series, refers to the lasting situation of this group of composers waiting for their music to gain recognition and posthumous appreciation.

In the three-part series “Franz Schreker’s master classes in Vienna and Berlin,” pianist, violinist, and tireless treasure hunter Kolja Lessing takes an in-depth look at the outstanding and multifaceted talents who emanated from the talent forge of Franz Schreker – the German-speaking world’s most important composition teacher of the 1910s and ’20s alongside Busoni and Schoenberg. In 1912, the year of the spectacular world premiere of his opera Der Ferne Klang in Frankfurt, Schreker became the successor to his mentor Robert Fuchs at the Vienna Academy of Music. He soon gained recognition as an authority on progressive pedagogy. His circle of students in Vienna included such figures as Ernst Krenek, Alois Hába, Artur Rodziński, Joseph Rosenstock, Felix Petyrek, Karol Rathaus, Wilhelm Grosz, and Max Brand. In 1920, at the pinnacle of his fame, Schreker was appointed director of the Berlin Musikhochschule. Along with him went Krenek and Hába, followed by the likes of Wunderkind Ignace Strasfogel, Berthold Goldschmidt, Jerzy Fitelberg, and many others, as well as – rather exceptional for the time – the female students Grete von Zieritz and Zdenka Ticharich. The most interesting music personalities to emerge from Franz Schreker’s Vienna composition class include Felix Petyrek (1892–1951). Petyrek enjoyed great recognition as a piano and composition teacher in Salzburg, Berlin, Abbazia, Athens, and Stuttgart (where he succeeded Wilhelm Kempff). Petyrek’s friendship with Hans and Werner Reinhart in Winterthur led him to anthroposophy. His oeuvre was strongly influenced by the impressions that the decline of the Habsburg Empire had made on him in his youth. The clash between tradition and modernity, the ambivalence of nostalgia and irony, and above all the loss of all human values during the First World War: all this can be heard in the disturbing world of his Six Grotesque Piano Pieces, the most famous of which, Der Wurstelprater, was relentlessly championed by no less than Erwin Schulhoff. Petryrek’s interest in the folk music traditions of Eastern Europe, Byzantine music, and the traditional Greek folk music that he studied in Athens led him to reflect upon polyphony and dodecaphony and the possibilities of creating new scales as alternatives to the major and minor tonalities. In his 3rd Piano Sonata from 1928, the many different (and sometimes widely disparate) influences in his creation coalesced in a fascinating synthesis based on a scale of symmetrically formed tetrachords, which Oliver Messiaen later classified in his system as the “2nd Mode.”

The idea: Goldschmidt, Weill, Gerhard – three exceptional students of three legendary composition teachers in Berlin’s “roaring twenties,” Schreker, Busoni, Schoenberg; works that (with the exception of Kurt Weill’s well-known, yet seldom performed 2nd Symphony) were long thought to be lost and are presented here for the first time in reference recordings; three composers who shared the same fate: persecution, political terror, racial fanaticism, and imposed exile. This second production in cooperation with the Berlin Chamber Symphony and its dedicated principal conductor and artistic director Jurgen Bruns (see also eda 13 and eda 26) exemplarily reflects the label’s sustained efforts to recover a buried repertoire of outstanding musical quality and toward insight into the partly intertwined and partly broken off lines of development in the musical history of the 20th century, a glimpse that extends beyond the issues of national traditions, aesthetic theories, and doctrines. The break which political persecution and emigration caused in the biographies of the composers presented here manifested itself in very different ways. Kurt Weill, one of the most prominent targets of the Nazis, already emigrated in 1933 by way of Paris – where he completed his 2nd Symphony – and on to the USA, where he succeeded in launching a second, illustrious carrier as a composer on Broadway. Berthold Goldschmidt was awarded the Mendelssohn Prize (Germany’s most prestigious composition award) for his Passacaglia for Orchestra op. 4 in 1925, when he was just a 22-year-old student in Schreker’s Berlin composition class. The successful premiere of his opera Der gewaltige Hahnrei in Mannheim in 1932 cemented his position as one of the leading composers of his generation. But his emigration to England in 1935 spelled the end of his carrier as a composer for the next 50 years. Goldschmidt was one of a very few to experience a rehabilitation on the international music scene – and, despite his advanced age, even succeeded at exciting the music world with an impressive swan song. His Suite op. 5, written before the Passacaglia, exhibits astounding parallels to neoclassicism and the nonchalance of a Kurt Weill. Roberto Gerhard, Schoenberg’s student in Vienna and assistant in Berlin, is now considered to be in equal measure the most important Catalan and Spanish composer of his generation. As an official representative of Catalan cultural policy in the 1930s, he was blacklisted by Franco. He emigrated via France to England, from where he launched a second, international career as the leading representative of English avant-garde from the ’60s to his death. His long-lost Concertino for Strings, which was to serve Gerhard as the basis for his Violin Concerto in 1942-43, is a key piece in the composer’s development. Written toward the end of his studies with Schoenberg in Berlin in the late 1920s, the piece owes a bit to the Lyrical Suite by Gerhard’s close friend Alban Berg, in terms of its flowing and sensitive application of increasing chromatics and the subtle combination of elegiac and fantastic elements.

The history of the 20th century was shaped to an extreme degree by ideological, political and racial barriers that hindered the arts from developing freely. Many artists were forced to emigrate, while others perished in death camps. Those who remained and survived were often cut off from the outside world, forced to adjust, or were silenced into submission. And this was by no means restricted to individual names: entire groups of artists and genres of art were eradicated and are no longer present in cultural life. With its series “Across Boundaries – Discovering Russia 1910–1940,” eda records seeks to bridge one such a gap in music history. It presents world premiere recordings of works by Russian composers who were part of the generation of Prokofiev and Shostakovich and who made major contributions to Russian music in the 1910s and 1920s. The reason why they were banished and suppressed: their Jewish ethnic background and refusal to accept the dictated “socialist realism.” Vol. 2 of the series puts the spotlight on the Russian-Jewish avant-garde and its dealings with Jewish folk and synagogal music: Lazare Saminsky (1882–1958), Joseph Achron (1886–1943), and Alexander Weprik (1899–1958) were considered the porte-paroles of the St. Petersburg “New Jewish School.” All three of them were involved in the Society for Jewish Folk Music founded in 1908. They developed a Jewish style along national lines which integrated elements of Jewish liturgical musical and folklore into European concert forms. The development of an independent Jewish identity in art music at the beginning of the 20th century was closely connected to the intellectual development of Polish and Russian Jewry. The idea of the national rebirth had a stimulating and motivational effect on Jewish culture in the Russian Empire ever since the 1880s. The Society for Jewish Folk Music was closely involved with this Jewish national movement in all areas of culture, and was influenced by cultural Zionist ideas. The artistic success of the colorful, nuanced and touching music of the “New Jewish School” did not last long – Stalinism and National Socialism quickly put an end to the movement.

Only three years separate the composition of the quartets by Leoš Janáček and Pavel Haas – and it’s hard to imagine two works by mentor and student in the same genre which could be so different from one another. While Janáček, an old man by then, declared his love to a 38-year younger woman (one-sided as it may have been) in this work from 1928, completing a work of tumultuous tragedy and nearly desperate melancholy (his second-to-last piece of all), Haas had returned three years prior from an easygoing summer in Affenbergen (near Brno) and created a suite-like work full of imagery and youthful high spirits. He himself wrote the following about it: “Movement dominates this entire carefree composition. From the rhythm of the birdsongs and the rolling landscape, the irregular motion of a horse-drawn carriage on the land, from the warm song of the human heart to the cool and silent flow of the moonshine, the jolly mood of a warm night’s celebration to the pure, innocent laughter of the morning’s sun... motion is abound here, motion which dominates everything. And that’s why I must emphasise that it is not a deliberate or peculiar act in this composition, when I use drums and jazz in the last movement, since this idea is inseparably connected to the work’s original plan, which culminates with rhythm and dynamics in the final movement.” Haas later withdrew the version with drums, but only because he felt he was drawing public criticism for it. Our recording is true to the original. Both composers were bards of Brno, the city which was always closer to Vienna than Prague was and quickly became much more Czech than the multicultural capital ever would. Without Janáček’s untiring work during the Habsburg era in the music scene of his hometown (which often went neglected in favour of Prague), the city would never have become the Moravian music metropolis which it is today. There (and at his summer retreat in Luhačovice), Janáček ecstatically wrote virtually all of his major works in the last ten years of his life. From the completion of his examinations to his deportation to Terezín in 1941, Pavel Haas worked as a freelance composer, theatre musician, teacher and author of numerous film musicals. He took a great interest in the media of his time, including radio, to which he dedicated a “Radio Overture” of his own. He died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in October, 1944.

This recording became a definite legend as of September 2013: Pianist Edith Kraus passed away in Jerusalem at the age of 100. Her biography was typical of that of Jewish artists in the 20th century, with the notable exception that she was one of the few to survive the infamous concentration camp Terezín. The vast majority of composers, performers, authors and fine artists who were deported there never left the camp alive or were murdered with poison gas at Auschwitz. Edith Kraus, piano Wunderkind, the youngest student of Arthur Schabel in Berlin, was on her way to an international carrier when she was deported to Terezín – a fate shared by Viktor Ullmann, one of the leading Czech composers of the interwar era, a student of Schönberg (and others), admiring friend of Alban Berg, and one of the greatest intellectuals of his time. eda records had the honour of meeting Edith Kraus in Prague in the early ’90s on the occasion of a memorial concert. When our producers asked whether she would be interested in recording a CD of sonatas by Viktor Ullmann with a newly founded German label, the 80-year-old pianist responded with an enthusiastic “Yes!” However, she did not end up choosing to play the three late-period sonatas, one of which she had even debuted in Terezín, but the first four instead, which she had never even studied. The result is a recording of Ullmann’s music from a the perspective of a great pianist’s look back on her life as a performer – as well as a gesture of reverence to Ullmann as one of the classic purveyors of the form, who himself occasionally drew inspiration from his classical and Romantic predecessors and paid homage to them by making use of their themes and motifs. Edith Kraus’ performance evokes her lifelong love of Mozart and Schubert as well as the German school of pianists, with which she bathed the occasional severity of Ullmann’s composition in a clear light with the wisdom of her age. This recording was to remain the only one Edith Kraus ever made, and now survives her as her artistic legacy. It has received many international awards.

Kolja Lessing dedicates this recording to Krzysztof Meyer on the occasion of the composer’s eightieth birthday in 2023. Meyer, one of the most important Polish composers of his generation, taught for many years as professor of composition at the Cologne College of Music and numbers among the important bridge-builders between Polish and German cultural life. As a pupil of Krzysztof Penderecki and Nadia Boulanger, he remarkably manages to integrate important communicative elements into an avant-garde musical language of great suggestive power and narrative charm. In the works written over a period of more than 40 years, Meyer proves himself to be an expert with profound knowledge of the technical possibilities of the violin. Kolja Lessing and Rainer Maria Klaas’s interpretations, developed with the composer, captivate by means of their authenticity, by dint of their deep understanding of a music that is both expressive and euphonious, and through which a distinguished, deeply humanistic personality speaks.

While art history defines as “École de Paris” an art-historical phenomenon, i.e. a large group of visual artists of non-French origin, many of them of Eastern European and Jewish descent, who worked in the French capital in the first decades of the twentieth century, musicology and musical life in general still find it difficult to recognize as music-historical reality an “Ècole de Paris” with the same complexity and seminal influence. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of its first appearance in the musical context, the 100th anniversary of the world premiere of Strawinsky’s seminal Octet and the 100th anniversary of George Antheil’s arrival in Paris, the present recording takes the opportunity to scrutinize the term “École de Paris” and to define it more clearly against the background of the enormous stylistic diversity of the various groups that came together in Paris of the1920s, their amicable interrelationships and reciprocal influences beyond the epochal break of 1939–45.

In the three-part series “Franz Schreker’s master classes in Vienna and Berlin,” pianist, violinist, and tireless treasure hunter Kolja Lessing takes an in-depth look at the outstanding and multifaceted talents who emanated from the talent factory of Franz Schreker – the German-speaking world’s most important composition teacher of the 1910s and ’20s alongside Busoni and Schoenberg. In 1912, the year of the spectacular world premiere of his opera Der Ferne Klang in Frankfurt, Schreker became the successor to his mentor Robert Fuchs at the Vienna Academy of Music. He soon gained recognition as an authority on progressive pedagogy. His circle of students in Vienna included such figures as Ernst Krenek, Alois Hába, Artur Rodziński, Joseph Rosenstock, Felix Petyrek, Karol Rathaus, Wilhelm Grosz, and Max Brand. In 1920, at the pinnacle of his fame, Schreker was appointed director of the Berlin Musikhochschule. Along with him went Krenek and Hába, followed by the likes of Wunderkind Ignace Strasfogel, Berthold Goldschmidt, Jerzy Fitelberg, and many others, as well as – rather exceptional for the time – the female students Grete von Zieritz and Zdenka Ticharich. The three piano sonatas presented as world premiere recordings on Vol. 2 are fascinating documents of the liberal spirit of Schreker’s class; a spirit that gave birth to such sharply contrasting works as the monumental Sonata in C Minor op. 2 by Karol Rathaus (still associated with late romanticism), the Stravinskyesque 1st Sonata by Jerzy Fitelberg (accentuated in its linear transparency), and the highly dramatic Sonata by Grete von Zieritz, which was conceived as a virtual tightrope walk between tradition and experiment. The music by Rathaus and Fitelberg, both of Polish-Jewish origins, led to eda’s subsequent exploration of a chapter in music history that had hardly received any attention before, namely the development of a Polish music culture outside the borders of a country fettered by partition and political suppression. The “Poland Abroad” series started in 2006 presents first recordings of other key works by Rathaus and Fitelberg, who both survived the war and the Shoah in exile in the US (eda 26, 35, 39).

Simon Laks (1901–1983) belonged to the group of young Polish musicians who, encouraged by Paderewski and Szymanowski, pursued careers in Paris of the interwar period. Due to his Jewish descent, he was deported in 1942 to Auschwitz, where he was able to survive as director of a camp orchestra in Birkenau. Long known primarily for the account of his survival, “Music of Another World”, his compositions, too, have meanwhile attracted international attention. This recording presents all of the composer’s existing songs and melodramas, largely in first recordings. Owing to the outstanding quality of the music as well as of the Polish and French texts, but above all against the background of the experiences that flowed into them and make them a testimony to deeply moving humanism, these works deserve a special place in the musical history of the twentieth century.