For his series called Schubert+, pianist Can Çakmur juxtaposes the complete major piano solo compositions by the Viennese composer with works by others who were inspired by his music, thus providing the opportunity to see these works in a new light. While making up a near complete anthology of Schubert’s completed major piano music, each disc is also intended as a self-contained recital.

In this third instalment, Çakmur presents not only a work by the 20th-century composer Ernst Krenek but also Krenek’s completion of an unfinished sonata by Schubert. In the process, Krenek assimilated the Schubertian language so well that the result is astonishing. As Çakmur says, ‘I would find it difficult to spot where Schubert ends and Krenek begins if it wasn’t specified in the score.’ Krenek, whose career spanned more than seven decades, was a prolific composer who embraced a host of styles. For his Second Piano Sonata, composed in the 1920s, he pays homage to Schubert by adopting some of his techniques, though the music owes much more to early 20th-century Paris than to 19th-century Vienna. A fascinating and neglected work to be discovered through the prism of Schubert.

The festival’s co-founder Strauss was a contemporary composer in his time, still capable of writing new and original works more than two decades later, and so the performance of contemporary works remains at the heart of the Festival’s identity, not least as a commitment and a counterbalance to assiduous cultivation of the classics. At a time in which the umpteenth new recording of classical works often seems less than essential, credit is all the more due to the Festival for programming “new music” that is already over a century old. One of this year’s new releases is Krenek’s Orpheus und Eurydike, a work that is several things rolled into one: “classical” subject-matter in the sense of a further reworking – in this case, of the creation myth of opera itself, not just since Monteverdi (1607), but since the primal “big bang” of the operatic cosmos with Caccini/Peri (1600); one of the timeless tales of human existence linking love, longing for the past and their transcendence in art; a bang-up-to-date work of art that nevertheless remains a work of its time, the era in which the Festival was founded; and above all a festal tribute to honour the 90th birthday of a major 20th-century composer. Krenek himself attended the1990 Festival performance documented here. Kokoschka’s stormily Expressionist narrative was put to paper between 1915 and 1917 in the aftermath of a passionate love affair with Alma Mahler, and set to music in headstrong mixed style by Schoenberg’s highly independent pupil between then and 1923. Given the literary standing of the librettist (and of the composer), ORFEO is additionally printing the libretto (from which the title of our text is taken), also bearing in mind that this recording is the first and only one ever to be released.

From the outset, Ernst Krenek stood between the sometimes antagonistic musical worlds of his mentor Franz Schreker, on the one hand, who wrote in the world of late Romanticism, and Arnold Schoenberg, on the other, who broke new ground. So, his own development towards becoming a unique personality in modern music history progressed correspondingly slowly. In his subsequent travelling years, as a composer he was on a quest for new means of expression, finally culminating in two such contrasting works as the jazz opera Jonny spielt auf and the technically strictly twelve-tone opera Karl V. Afterwards, he occasionally resorted to these earlier stylistic devices like we can hear on this recording as example of the 1927 composed Potpourri and years later written Tricks and Trifles (1945)

Japanese-Canadian pianist Yoko Hirota stuns with impeccable pianism on SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL: MINIATURE PIANO PIECES. Originally recorded in 2009, this remastered edition brings out the intricacies of 20th- and 21st-century piano composition with a clarity that was previously unheard of. The first half of the album's track list reads like an exhaustive compendium of 1900's compositional celebrities: Schoenberg, Krenek, Ligeti, Berio. It's a brainy choice: the tracks on SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL aren't ordered by length, as one might intuit, but instead in geographical and roughly chronological order. Vienna's modernists may have laid the foundation, but North America's modernists took serial and atonal composition to the next level. And so, to do the matter justice, there is a splendidly representative selection of Elliott Carter’s oeuvre, along with pieces by Canadian composers - John Beckwith. Despite the immense differences in cultural background and era – the selection spans almost a century, after all – they are all united by one distinguishing feature: They are short pieces, with lengths between 31 seconds and six-and-a-half minutes. Yoko Hirota, who holds a doctoral degree in piano performance and currently teaches the piano at the Music Department of Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada, plays all of these pieces with academic precision, regardless of their respective geographical or temporal provenance. A recording veteran with six previous contemporary albums under her belt, her grasp of the modernist zeitgeist is not only palpable, but extraordinary. And it shows: there is a subtle lyricism even where traditional harmonies clash, a sensitivity not just for the musical language of the era, but for the greater principles that underpin them. SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL doesn't just serve as an index of contemporary piano composition and its roots, it's a worthwhile addition to a modernist record collection on merit of Hirota's powerful interpretation alone.

This first extended survey of the piano music of Ernst Krenek (1900–92) continues with a range of works showing his craftsmanship and imagination – and humor. The early Toccata and Chaconne, Op. 13, has its origins in a joke intended to pull the legs of musicologists and music critics, but it develops into a massive contrapuntal essay of astonishing ambit. Krenek’s treatment of Baroque and contemporary dances in the three early suites reveal a fondness for learned whimsy – and that wry dispassion informs even the elegiac and brittle Fifth Sonata, written a quarter-century later in American exile. The closing Sechs Vermessene are kaleidoscopic miniatures with an improvised quality, as if advanced musical modernism were meeting the freest of free jazz.

October 29, 1923 - a date steeped in history. In the midst of a year of political and economic crisis, the age of public radio in Germany was ushered in with the first broadcast of the "Berliner Funkstunde", from the attic of an office building on Potsdamer Platz. The composers assembled on this album not only profited from these developments, but also, in part, actively shaped them.

The composer Ernst Toch experienced the crisis year of 1923 in Mannheim, where his "Dance Suite" op. 30 was premiered on with great success. In this work, Toch was able to realize his interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration and new forms of expression. His imaginative use of instruments is one of the most fascinating aspects of the suite.

The "Frauentanz" for soprano, flute, viola, clarinet, horn and bassoon op. 10 by Kurt Weill, written in the summer of 1923, reflects the interest in chamber music line-ups typical of the time. The decisive factor was not only a new ideal of sound and expression, but also the experience that in times of crisis, pieces with small ensembles had better chances of being performed.

Ernst Krenek had found essential impulses for his work in Berlin; when the crisis came to a head in the summer of 1923 he composed the "Three Mixed Choirs" a cappella op. 22 on poems by Matthias Claudius. Krenek designed these folksong-like works written by a lyricist from the epoch of Empfindsamkeit as parables.

For the festive concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of the unification of the cities of Buda and Pest to form the capital and residence city of Budapest in the autumn of 1923, Béla Bartók created his "Dance Suite" for orchestra - a "rather touchy issue", as the internationalist-minded composer explained in a private note.

REVIEWS:

Given [the events of 1923 in central Europe], you might imagine a CD of mostly German music entitled 1923: Wild Sound of the 1920s might sound a bit, well, wild. Far from it. If anything, it shows the opposite: surrounded by violence and the threat of chaos, the four composers represented here by works they composed in 1923 responded by raising their art to the nth degree of refinement and subtlety. Take Ernst Krenek, a composer who nowadays is remembered for a smash hit opera about a Black jazz musician, and for writing later in life some of the most fearsomely intellectualized, complex works in the entire history of music. He’s represented on this disc by three settings for choir of the 18th-century poet Matthias Claudius, of a ravishing otherworldly beauty caught to perfection in these performances.

Kurt Weill, known to the world for his bitingly satirical music dramas, appears as the composer of seven exquisitely allusive, bittersweet songs based on medieval German poems. Ernst Toch’s Dance Suite is a brilliantly imagined set of six “character” pieces for just a handful of instruments, with titles like The Red Whirling Dance and Idyll. Standing somewhat to one side of all this German romantic/modernist intensity and compression is the Dance Suite by the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, with its rumbustious evocations of Balkan and North African Music.

The occasional whiff of expressionist harshness or a gently satirical distortion of a waltz shows these composers were not completely cocooned in their composing studios. They were alert to the jarring, shifting currents outside. But what the CD reveals most strongly is how much these composers were focused on their own internal, imaginative world – and how much they cared about craftsmanship. Every bar in all four pieces is exquisitely made, and that quality is caught in the performances, which are all of enormous refinement.

-- The Telegraph

The year 1923 was a year of crisis in Germany; inflation was heating up and far right-wing parties were jockeying for power. In October, the first broadcast of public radio in Germany took place from the “Berliner Funkstunde” station on Potsdamer Platz. This provocative new disc from the Choir and Symphony of Bavarian Radio includes four works written a hundred years ago by a group of innovative composers who all made use of the new, disruptive technology of radio.

Kurt Weill’s Frauentanz is a suite of seven medieval songs, scored for soprano, flute, viola, clarinet, horn and bassoon. Weill helped to create the familiar soundtrack for Weimar Berlin, and this performance by Anna-Maria Palii and the fine instrumentalists of the Bayerischen Rundfunks orchestra provides the authentic feel of a society that was becoming increasingly decadent and hysterical in 1923 and beyond.

Ernst Toch’s Dance Suite is another clever and imaginative piece with interesting orchestration: flute, clarinet, violin, viola, double bass and percussion. The Berlin sound is also evident here, something a bit harsh and raw, in contrast with the softer-focused, more lyrical and pastoral modernism of Paris.

The Ernst Krenek work is a bit of a surprise: his 3 Choruses for a cappella choir . The ‘antique’ sound of these pieces remind me of two of my favorite works: Vaughan Williams’ G minor Mass, from 1921, and Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Missa São Sebastião, from 1937. All three provide old wine in new bottles: ancient cadences with a modernist twist.

The final work on the disc is probably the best known: Bela Bartok’s Dance Suite for Orchestra. This is an orchestral showpiece, a kind of try-out for his Concerto for Orchestra written more than two decades later. Both pieces treat orchestral instruments in a solistic, virtuosic way. The source material might be folkloric, but this is definitely written in a modernist idiom.

Inflation, far right-wing agitation, disruptive technology: yes, we’re talking about 1923, not 2023. And the music on this disc is as fresh and forward-looking as some of the best music written today.

-- Music for Several Instruments (Dean Frey)

"The performances on these discs have one thing in common: they are almost shockingly direct, so that one hears the mind of the composer Hindemith working behind every note. Anyone used to the readings of Mozart’s K.428 and Beethoven’s Op. 96 by, say, the Busch or Smetana Quartets may feel a lack of colour and nuance here. ..And yet, if the listener is patient, much will be gained by attending carefully to this no-frills approach." (Tully Potter)

Ernst Krenek’s early musical development was informed by the middle-class cultural ambient of the city of Vienna. Already at an early age he heard his mother playing “salon pieces” on the piano; they attended musical theater performances and the Sunday matinees conducted by Alexander Zemlinsky in the nearby Volksoper. The popular repertoire of operettas, military bands, and cabaret also had a fixed place in the life of the Kreneks.

Ernst Krenek learned a wide spectrum of musical literature from his piano teacher. Together they played four-hand arrangements of operas and symphonies. The works of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss had a great influence on him, especially the latter, since at that time he was – as the ‘leader of the most radical modernism’ (Krenek, Memoirs) – on the path to world fame. In spite of their merely playful, childish aspirations, his own early attempts at composition can be associated to his biographical world. In terms of style, they are clearly obliged to the musical language of Viennese classicism and romanticism. The titles of these sometimes only partially realized compositions prove to be an interesting mirror of the social reality of the not yet ten-year-old: biblical and sacred motifs dominate alongside references to historical events, above all from the military history of the Habsburg Monarchy. These ambitious works were complemented by smaller marches and waltzes for piano. In his early and mid-teens, a clear development toward vocal settings of German poetry is evident, be it as art songs or choral works. Occasional instrumental works, such as variation works for piano trio, a sonata for cello and piano, or a stage work, are early testimony of the diversity in Krenek’s future oeuvre.

REVIEW:

Collectors who’ve resisted the thorny atonality of Ernst Krenek’s mature piano music will find his earlier works for the instrument, well, tonal and not all that thorny! Think of Max Reger’s short piano pieces or Korngold’s keyboard output, and you’ve basically got the young Krenek.

Listen to the First sonata’s zestful and harmonically restless Rondo finale, for example. I would have mistaken it for an idiomatic piano transcription of one of Richard Strauss’ late-period wind ensemble pieces. The Sonatina No. 2 Gavotte’s modulatory wanderlust makes the Gavotte from Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony sound minimalist by comparison. In the single-movement Sonatina No. 5 and the Six Piano Pieces, Krenek begins to branch out into the terse expressive qualities, angular phrasings, and tonal ambiguity characterizing his later sonatas.

Mikhail Korzhev makes a cogent and convincing case for this repertoire, which comes as no surprise, given his dazzling and authoritative recordings of Krenek’s first three piano concertos. The pianist’s incisive fingerwork vivifies sequences in obsessive dotted rhythms, such as in the Sonatina No. 1’s Vivace finale and the Sonatina No. 3’s Scherzettino, while giving ample attention to bass lines. Korzhev plays up the Sonatina No. 2’s central Theme and Variations sudden mood shifts in a way that never makes them sound episodic or fragmented. He clearly understands and believes in the music, which makes this release an ever more valuable addition to the Krenek discography.

-- ClassicsToday.com (Jed Dislter)