Korngold: Symphony In F#, Op. 40/Much Ado About Nothing (Incidental Music)
Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra/Marc Albrecht
PentaTone Classics 5186 373
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

The music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold is finally getting its due, something which the composer never would have thought possible perhaps.  Having created classic film scores for Errol Flynn films in the 1930s, the composer slowly tried to recapture some of the attention of the concert world.  Unfortunately, the rich post-romantic music of the likes of Zemlinsky and Richard Strauss was already being somewhat overshadowed by a host of composers exploring atonal music and jazz rhythms.  But, the communicability of Korngold’s music in and out of the concert hall perhaps meant that inevitably its day would come.  While the Violin Concerto appears to have now entered the standard repertoire, his other orchestral pieces are only slowly doing so.  His one work in the genre, the Symphony in F#, Op. 40, has five-six current recordings in the catalogue each with its merits.  This new release on PentaTone comes with the added multi-channel super audio stereo approach.  It features the same coupling as Andre Previn’s superb Deutsche Grammophon recording now over a decade old!

Korngold’s symphony was composed in the first part of the 1950s.  He had returned to Austria hoping to restart his concert career only to find that no one wanted to go back to the “good old days” and that he and his music were a relic of the past.  Even the committed premiere performance by Wilhelm Furtwangler of the Symphonic Serenade by the Vienna Philharmonic in 1950 was not enough to help Korngold’s hopes come to fruition.  He had already begun a symphony while in Vienna and there is a lot of the drama of opera and his film works that can be heard in it.  The work bears a dedication to Franklin Delano Roosevelt suggesting his own appreciation for his refuge in America.  There may have been some sense that the symphony as a genre was dead by 1950.  Copland’s Third Symphony had essentially sealed the genres Americana possibilities.  Vaughan-Williams’ massive Sinfonia Antarctica would be completed in 1952 and is a bit interesting with its film music connections as a companion work of far differing style.  Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony was also being completed and Shostakovich’s film-like Tenth Symphony was still on the horizon.  Korngold’s work then can stand by itself against any and all of these.

It is obvious from the opening bars that Albrecht has spent some time trying to get at the heart of this difficult work and hears it perhaps as an anguished extension of Mahlerian proportions.  The visceral edge of the opening brass and percussion punctuations are quite crisp and when this moves on to the more Romantic, lush chromaticism, the contrast is stark and quite dramatic.  It is as if these two sounds are truly fighting it out with one another: Austrian symphonic tradition versus Hollywood.  The second movement’s scherzo opening zips by at breakneck speed like someone rushing with excitement only to be stopped dead by the starkness of its central section which might be like someone looking at the devastation of a huge battlefield, and yet as the scherzo returns there are moments of great hope that seems to be bittersweet before its massive final bars.  One of the great moments of the symphony is its gorgeous slow movement with recognizable themes from The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Captain Blood, and Anthony Adverse.  The minor cast and foreboding shifts make one wonder if these great musical moments from Korngold’s past were being looked at as somehow tragic with a sense of what could have been darkening the composer’s lived reality. 

Albrecht’s performance is simply astounding.  From the taut opening to the depth of the slower moments of the score, it is obvious that he takes this work on its own merits fully informed of its intended connection to its Austrian predecessors and firmly rooted in the style of Korngold at the same time.  This is not a performance that tries to make this a “nice” film music symphony, nor does it try to overstate this as a concert work, instead the performance manages to grab your attention and never hesitates to move through the various episodic moments with great dramatic musical sense.  You may not find a better performance of this work and the recording quality is simply amazing.  The huge orchestral sections are just overwhelmingly powerful and still clear.

A quick timing comparison of other recordings of the work shows that Albrecht tends towards some faster tempi overall, though nothing ever feels rushed or out of place.  Instead one gets an emotionally powerful performance.  I have not heard Werner Andreas Albert’s recording of this work in his overview of Korngold’s orchestral music for comparison.  The Delos was one of those great appearances of James DePreist on disc (with the Oregon Symphony) and both the Previn (with the London Symphony) and Welser-Most (with the Philadelphia Orchestra) have their plus sides as well.  Albrecht’s tempi though seem to work very well as a whole making the structure of the symphony work without collapsing.

By itself the performance of the symphony would be enough to recommend this disc.  But the companion piece, the incidental music for Much Ado About Nothing will be of interest as well,.  This 1918 work for the stage, and a chamber ensemble, was then arranged (1920) as a 5-part concert suite which has been fairly popular in concert halls.  Here is where Albrecht’s recording takes on a slight lead over Previn’s in that this release includes the “Overture” for the work (Previn’s recording only has 4 of the movements. Otherwise, the timings and performance are quite similar to that earlier release.  The music is simply delightful and is superbly performed and recorded about as well as one could hope.

This is easily one of the best recordings of symphonic music you will hear and it is hard to imagine a better performance of the Korngold symphony.  Listener’s may be quite curious to explore the other five releases, especially those with the Strasbourg orchestra which really seems to respond to his leadership.  Highly recommended!

Korngold: The String Quartets
Doric String Quartet
Chandos 10611
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

When one hears the name “Korngold” the music that comes to mind is that post-Romantic, richly-orchestrated Hollywood film score.  To think that such a master of orchestral color would turn to that most intimate and personal of settings, the string quartet, might seem counter-intuitive, and yet the three works Korngold wrote for the genre allow for a fascinating overview of his compositional style.  The quartets span a twenty-five year period of creativity and manage to come from three different decades.  Korngold’s quartets maintain a key-center and a firmer rooting in tonality than some of his contemporaries writing for the same forces.  Consider that Bartok had composed two quartets in the earlier decade with Korngold’s first foray in the genre coming right between them and Bartok’s third quartet.  While the two styles could not be further from one another, it turns out that they are both writing works that allow for listeners to experience the development of their musical styles in such personal ways. 

Prior to each of these quartets, Korngold had finished a major project.  In the case of the first of these, written between 1920 and 1923, he had just finished what many consider his magnum opus, the opera Die tode Stadt.  This is a work coming out of a tradition explored by his contemporaries Zemlinsky, Weigl, and Schmidt.  The piece is cast in a traditional four-movement scheme and is a fascinatingly engaging piece that must be one of the most difficult works to play in the repertoire.  Each instrument engages in the discourse of a highly-chromatic fast paced idea and a more secondary lyrical one in the first movement.  Clusters of chords lend the music a harmonic edge that veers close to atonality but never reaches it.  The slower, expressive second movement features a melodic idea that could easily have fit into one of his 1930s film scores.  The movement features some rich harmony and dense string writing that at times has a mysterious quality.  The fast paced “Intermezzo” follows with writing that explores a variety of string technique.  There are hints of rich harmony and the movement is filled with a variety of clear textures.  The finale features a bird-call like opening before a march with double and triple-stopping brings this thirty-minute plus work to its conclusion.  It proves to be an important early-20^th century addition to the quartet repertoire whose lack of performances may have more to do with its difficulty.  It is a quite personal work with an at times melancholic sense that feels as if it is casting an eye back to a better time and place. 

The second quartet, in Eb major, was written in 1933.  It comes right before his first departure from Europe to Hollywood.  The first movement is another study in contrasts with an agitated opening idea (perhaps a rhythmical nod to Beethoven) and a more lyric second theme placed often in immediate call and answer to one another.  There are some fascinating turns of melody here that are a true hallmark of Korngold’s more familiar musical style that would develop over the next decade.  Here we get to experience it in its densest form.   One wonders how much of the Second Viennese School was at the back of Korngold’s mind as he worked on this piece that moves away from the more traditional harmony.  The second movement is a true delight with its contrast of simple melodic ideas and rich harmonic exploration that gives way to an exciting central scherzo-like section.  It features a quite catchy tune.  The third movement moves back to the more diffuse mysteriousness that pairs rich chromaticism with harmonics in a rather ethereal slow movement of great emotional depth.   The “Finale” finds Korngold exploring the Viennese waltz in a loving way as a symbol of the greatness of Austrian light music.  There are a series of variations that further explore the quartet and work towards a brilliant conclusion.

The third quartet, which he worked on from 1944-45, marked a return to absolute composition after years of writing for Hollywood.  The piece is the first in which the composer would mine his film works for thematic material.  The first movement is the exception though based entirely on material unique to this work.  The movement explores the interval of a major seventh—a unifying feature in the score as a whole.  This is a traditionally constructed sonata form movement and flows quite well out of the sound world of the second quartet.  Here though the music seems to have a sadness that only small glimmers of light can barely penetrate, though it ends on a quite major chord.  The second movement is a fantastic, almost macabre, scherzo that is very Bartokian but features a strikingingly lyrical central section whose theme comes from Korngold’s score for Between Two Worlds.  This movement really shows off the musicianship and impeccable attacks of the Doric ensemble.  The third movement is marked “Like a folk tune” and it is derived from a harmonica theme used in The Sea Wolf.  The outer moments of the movement are surely among the most emotionally deep expressions the composer ever wrote.  The central section of the “Finale” derives from music for the film Devotion.  Like the previous incarnation “quotes” this too gets transformed into something that is still unique within this texture.  It’s contrast comes as brief relief to the exciting joyousness of the opening and closing sections.  Of particular interest is the way previous thematic ideas appear prior to the final conclusion.  While there were still some important works to come, the Third Quartet has a sense of an established composer wishing his career had perhaps been different.  It is a reminder of Korngold’s sense that his film music was slumming and would be forgotten, that he never became the great Austrian composer that his earlier life has promised.  Unfortunate that he would never know how much his music would be loved throughout the world.  These three concert works each are like layers of the composer’s soul lay bear for people willing to enter into their more complicated emotional universe but the rewards are great.

Chandos’ release is the first time that all three of the quartets are on a single disc.  The second quartet has a few more recordings to its credit.  The Doric String Quartet has been around for some thirteen years and will be embarking on a tour of American cities as well as places in Australia, New Zealand and Scandinavia.  The rave reviews for their committed concert performances is apropos in this well-performed and recorded set of quartets.  Clear articulation, a grasp of the subtle changes in style, and a perfect sense of dramatic musical shaping, all make this release an engaging and full listening experience.  This will be the recording to beat should other quartets take the challenge.