Trails of Creativity: Music from between the Wars - Vienna-Berlin-London 1918-1938

[From BBC Music Magazine, January 2003]

‘Degenerates’ regenerated

Malcolm Miller meets a violinist with a mission to unearth pan-European connections

England

‘Vienna-Berlin- London, 1918-1938’, the festival held in London in 2001, brought to light fascinating connections between European composers of the Twenties and Thirties, including those whose works were branded ‘Entartete Musik’ (degenerate music) by the Nazi regime and who found refuge in Britain and America. Several rediscovered gems of this repertoire now appear on a CD from the duo of Austrian violinist David Frühwirth and Finnish pianist Henri Sigfridsson. Frühwirth, who is steadily forging an international career (he studied with Ricci, Bron and Zukerman and won the 1998 New York Panasonic Award) is a passionate advocate of this neglected music and has been supported by an expert team: the producer is Michael Haas, who masterminded Decca‘s Entartete Musik series, and the sound engineer is Simon Fox, grandson of the Viennese composer Hans Gal. ‘I believe in Gal and love his music,‘ says Frühwirth. ‘The Second Violin Sonata is a truly passionate work.‘

One of Frühwirth‘s more startling discoveries is the Suite for Violin by Adolf Busch, leader of the famous Busch Quartet, who emigrated from Berlin to the USA in the Thirties. ‘Busch composed prolifically and his widow is eager to have his works played. Many of them, including symphonies, are still in manuscript. Other composers featured include the Polish-born Berliner Karol Rathaus and the more familiar Kurt Weill and Erich Korngold who escaped to Hollywood and Broadway respectively. Frühwirth says that selecting worthy repertoire was not always easy: ‘I had to decide what was really good, and not just historically interesting. Of 15 English works of the period at least ten were possible, but we were especially fortunate to be able to include for the first time the newly published complete version of Walton’s Toccata.’

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[From Gramophone, February 2003]

Fascinating and well-presented programme of mostly unfamiliar repertoire

There are seven première recordings here, and two pieces that are not – the Korngold and Weill suites – are much better known in orchestral guises. Nearly all are real finds, such as Hans Gál’s D major Sonata (1933, his second), which opens the first disc. His music, like that of Egon Wellesz, whose 1937 Suite (revised 20 years later) is the centrepiece of Disc 2, continues to be scandalously under-represented in the recording studio and concert hall; yet the Sonata is a warm and lyrical work, beautifully put together. It beggars belief that its first performance took place only in November 2001 (by these same artists). Wellesz's work is in a more severe Schoenbergian idiom, though containing neo-Baroque elements, as does the Suite by Karol Rathaus, another undervalued composer, which the casual listener may find more immediate in appeal. Its four tonal but hard-edged movements contrast well with Gál’s Sonata but eclipse Frederick Rosse’s pallid incidental music (1905) to The Merchant of Venice, presented in Albert Sammons’s idiomatic 1921 transcription. If there is a piece out of place in style and quality it is this; Korngold’s Much Ado About Nothing suite succeeds it in every sense of the word.
The youthful Toccata (1922-3) by Walton is a real eye-opener, almost wholly unrecognisable as the work of the creator of Belshazzar’s Feast. An intriguing listen, not least for its echoes of contemporary European masters and the absence of obvious ‘Englishness’, it makes a more immediate impression than Busch's Suite, though the latter's ‘exquisite craftsmanship’ ultimately proves more satisfying. Stefan Frenkel’s arrangement - made with the composer’s approval - of Weill’s Threepenny Opera Suite is entertaining and most idiomatic; its burlesque contrasts nicely with the two Gurney miniatures that round out the programme. Both players perform with understanding and sensitivity, though Frühwirth's intonation is occasionally a little suspect, and the tuning of Sigfridsson’s piano audibly suffers in the Walton Toccata. These are relatively minor quibbles, though, for such a worthwhile and often compelling enterprise of music - the Rosse aside - deservedly rescued from oblivion. Recommended.

Guy Rickards