Jörg Demus, born in Austria in 1928, has became one of today's best-known pianists, though his work as a composer has received rather less attention....

Jörg Demus, born in Austria in 1928, has became one of today's best-known pianists, though his work as a composer has received rather less attention. He came from a musical background and entered the Vienna State Academy of Music at the age of 11 to study piano, organ, conducting, and composing. He later moved to Paris, his piano tutors being a distinguished quintet: Walter Gieseking, Wilhelm Kempff, Edwin Fischer, Yves Nat, and Benedetti-Michelangeli. He was to follow a career as both soloist and accompanist, and in addition to his prolific public appearances, he has made more than 350 recordings.

Joseph Marx was his composition mentor, and his works have mainly been in the field of chamber and instrumental music, many of them involving the cello, the rudiments of which he learned as a young man. The major stimulus, however, was Jörg's cello-playing brother, and his easy use of the instrument points to a composer well versed in its singing qualities.

The inspiration for the present disc also comes from the poet Paul Verlaine. The earliest work is the Sonate poétique using Verlaine's poem, Art poétique, the composer intending the music to cover all human emotions from sadness to the sunny and vivacious. It is in four movements, the second a hunting scherzo, and the third a deeply moving prayer of homage.

Verlaine's poem Crimen Amoris, with the opening words "And it is night, night blue with a thousand stars," was the thought in Demus's mind when writing the short work, Amour. This poem of exotic beauty is reflected in a highly Romantic and serene score. The Cello Sonata was originally written for viola, the mood being one of sadness, with the second movement inspired by Verlaine's Chant d'automne. Again in four movements, the first, "Sunset," is over half as long again as the total of the remaining movements, and is a miniature tone-poem in itself. "Nuit d'étoiles" has the bizarre story of having been a piano trio, but when at the last minute the violinist could not take part in a performance in Japan, Demus hurriedly wrote the whole score for cello and piano duo.

He is a melodic writer, looking backward to the period of Romantic composition when music was a thing of rapt beauty. There is no challenge to the listener, though those passages in the cello's upper stratosphere would tax the finest performer. The German-born cellist Maria Kliegel, onetime winner of the Rostropovich Competition, produces an endless flow of the most beautiful tone from her Stradivarius, though one wishes the disc's producer had asked for a few more takes to erase those moments when you feel uncomfortable with the cello intonation. With the performances in the hands of the composer, the outcome should represent his view of the music. That would indicate a sadness deep in his soul, with a nostalgia for a period of music that passed many decades ago. His playing is ideally balanced with the cello, the piano often dancing around the slower moving cello part. I particularly warmed to Kliegel's impassioned account of the opening movement of the Sonata, those burnished tones deep in the instrument quite ravishing.

The recording, made in Austria in 1996, appears to have come from a very small and confined studio that brings clarity yet misses that tonal bloom high on the cello you feel this music must have. An essential purchase? Maybe not, but I enjoyed it.

-- David Denton, FANFARE [11/1998]