October 9, 2012

  • Review: Early Korngold Chamber Music

     

    Korngold: String Sextet, Op. 10; Piano Quintet, Op. 15
    Camerata Freden
    Tacet 198
    Total Time:  68:12
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

     

    The International Freden Music Festival was established in 1991 in this small village of some 3000 people in Lower Saxony.  The purpose of the festival is to explore lesser known pieces and in addition commissions one new work each year.  The festival usually focuses on a specific theme and through its educational commitments and workshops introduces hosts of people to new musical experiences.  In the present recording, they are taking on two early, pre-Hollywood, chamber pieces by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.  The String Sextet was written when the composer was only 19 while the Piano Quintet comes from his mid-twenties.  Both allow windows into Korngold’s development as a composer in the post-romantic tradition of Zemlinsky, but also experimenting and borrowing from recent developments in atonal music by Schoenberg (whose first symphonic poem is quite like Zemlinsky’s style) and even the early appearances of Neo-Classicism.  Both works are generally paired together on disc.

    The 1916 String Sextet in D, Op. 10 opens with a quite modern “Moderato-Allegro” where thematic lines have more angular leaps and in which harmonic language seems to teeter on the edge of atonality.  Each line though is somehow distinctly audible in the texture in the more contrapuntal moments of the music.  The sheer dramatic thrust of this movement is a sign of things to come as is occasionally beautiful lyric writing if more overt romanticism.  The staccato writing will sometimes make one think of Bartok, also honing his compositional style at this time.  The second movement moves deliciously between major and minor tonalities in an almost decadent way making this work feel more a part of Expressionist aesthetics.  In fact, one might consider listening to this work and Schoenberg’s 1899 sextet, Verklarte Nacht, to get a sense of the different approaches to this chamber force.  The third movement “Intermezzo” takes a little time to develop into a rather interesting little landler though it feels at times slightly off (a la Mahler).  The final “presto” has some thematic revisiting to tie the work together but the march-like idea with harsh dissonances, never getting quite as macabre as Shostakovich, and an almost Baroque-like canon that does not quite get off the ground but serves to move back to the main thematic idea are quite striking. 

     We fast-forward five years for the second work on the disc, the Piano Quintet in E, Op. 15.  The piece, composed over the course of 1921-1922, followed his opera Die Todt Stadt.  We are in a different world here than the sextet with more romantic lines in strings supported by rich harmonies in the piano providing an inviting opening.  This is intimate chamber music writing of the highest order with shifts into the sort of expressionist/romantic moods explored in the earlier work, though it is the latter often winning out in the quintet.  Most fascinating is how Korngold’s melodic lines seem to emerge from his harmony.  The central movement is a set of variations of one of the composer’s earlier songs (“Mond, so gehst du wieder” Op. 14, no.3).  Slowly the melodic idea builds in strings against a simple chordal piano accompaniment with only slightly expanded harmony in a gorgeously evocative dream-like movement which provides a truly intimate musical experience.  Most fascinating is the way Korngold builds tension by moving up and away from his initial established harmonic center in this movement often landing in unexpected places.  The climax in particular seems to veer nearly out of control before settling back down though not without very high violin writing.  The final movement is a masterful exploration of developing motivic material.  The music morphs into new directions though this is still essentially a monothematic movement with development.  Some of the musical gestures here will be familiar to fans of Korngold’s later work. 

    The performances here are quite exceptional with beautiful playing and phrasing that captures the essence of these pieces.  The tendency to try and make Korngold’s early music sound lush like his later Hollywood pieces can often destroy the intimacy of these chamber works.  Here, the flashes of ultra-romantic ideas flow sensitively out of the more atonal-sounding material creating dramatic performances.  The crispness of the recording allows individual lines to be captured rather cleanly and the results are quite engaging.  While other recordings of these works are often equally captivating, this is certainly a disc worth seeking out for fans of chamber music performance and Korngold.