Breaking the Silence: Schulhoff, Ullmann, Korngold, and Zehavi

Clarion String Quartet
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Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

The Clarion Quartet are all members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and make their debut recording with this collection of pieces from “banned” composers of WWII.  The album was the result of their own trip to the concentration camp at Terezin.  Composer Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944) was deported to that concentration camp and was killed at Auschwitz days after his arrival.  A similar fate befell Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) who died from tuberculosis in the camps.  Both men’s works were part of the music that was banned by the Nazi party.  Over the past couple of decades, some of this music has come to light and begun to be more widely performed and recorded.  Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) managed to flee to American where he would carve out a career writing some of the finest film scores of the Golden Age.  These works present to us the unique individual styles and voices of these composers serving as a reminder of what culture loses on so many levels when prejudice, stereotypes, and insanity become the rule of the day.

Schulhoff was perhaps the epitome of the early 20^th-Centuries wide range of styles.  His music tends to pull from a variety of aesthetical approaches with often flirtations with jazz (he would perform under a pseudonym to get work after 1939).  He eventually would become a citizen of the Soviet Union which would lead to his arrest and subsequent early death.  The Five Pieces for String Quartet (1923) are firmly in his more modernist style exploring a variety of folk dance rhythms and musical inflections.  The “Alla Serenata” tends toward a more expressionist dissonance that marks it as a certainly more intense musical discourse that lends this work its more serious musical nature.  This continues a bit more in the “Czech Dance” with its angular ideas and jagged rhythmic edges.

The Third String Quartet of Viktor Ullmann was composed while he was interred at Terezin in 1942.  A student of Schoenberg, one anticipates how his own exploration of tone rows will unfold, heard most in the slower “movement” of the work.  Though in a single movement, the work has an internal structure that moves through four unique sections held together by motivic connections.  The opening has a waltz-like idea that feels as if it is heard through a gauze of reflection and unattainability.  There is a bittersweetness to the chromaticism here that feels somewhat twisted and tortured as it gains in intensity.  The resulting fugue also adds to this sense a bit before moving into a brutal formal rondo.  It is a striking and intriguing piece that pulls along through a variety of sonic images that seem to move between the more Romantic and lyrical and the more brutal and angular dissonance.

The literature and repertoire for the 20^th Century string quartet tends to hinge around those of Bartok and Shostakovich.  So it is equally telling to note that Korngold wrote his first two essays in this genre while the former composer was working on his own second and third quartets.  Korngold’s first two works are firmly rooted in the post-Romanticism of Zemlinsky perhaps most closely.  The third quartet was one of the first absolute works the composer began after being a very successful film music composer.  Begun in 1944 and completed the following year, the work was the first to mine themes from his film works.  The opening movement explores the interval of a major seventh which also is a unifying factor throughout the work.  It is cast in a more traditional sonata form and seems to imply a tinge of regret.  The scherzo bears perhaps the closest parallel to that of Bartok’s style.  The music breaks at the center to explore the lyrical theme from Between Two Worlds.  The harmonic theme from The Sea Wolf finds its way into the folkish third movement.  For the finale, music from Devotion, also appears.  Though pulled from his other musical life, Korngold explores and develops these themes still further creating deeply emotional and intimate work.  Themes also recur in the conclusion to bring a larger unity to the piece.  One gets the sense that Korngold felt these great themes needed to be cast in more serious settings so that they would have a new life and not be forgotten.  It is as if he is reflecting on the sort of international serious work that his early music had promised, and which had been shattered to become a Hollywood composer and the negative connotations that went with it.

As a sort of final encore, the quartet has chosen an arrangement of the hymn-like A Walk to Caesarea.  The piece was originally written to a poem by Hannah Szenes (herself a victim of the holocaust) and set to music by David Zehavi in 1945.  The quartet plays a version arranged by Boris Pigovat.  Hence, the album closes with a piece that honors these oft-ignored and silenced pieces.

The group plays these pieces with great attention to detail and articulation.  The performances here are marked by excellent rhythmic ensemble coupled with quite beautiful lyricism when called for throughout the performance.  The acoustic is a bit on the dry side lending the sound a more immediate and closer feel.  The inclusion of the Korngold will likely grab the attention of the casual browser and they will be rewarded with a fine performance of that quartet, but many will relish the discovery of these Schulhoff and Ullmann works the most.

Michael G. Cunningham: An Arc of Quartets
Sirius Quartet; Moravian Quartet; Pedroia Quartet;
New England String Quartet; Millenium Quartet
Navona Records 6081
Disc One—Total Time:  54:23
Disc Two—Total Time:  38:01
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

The string quartet has always been the place where a composer can truly develop their style.  It provides an intimate setting and a breadth of opportunity that can address any number of musical elements and techniques as well as a fairly diverse set of formal possibilities.  Michigan-born composer Michael G. Cunningham can be heard exploring this in this new collection of seven quartets.  Cunningham taught at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire for three decades and has a variety of works in his catalog.  The quartets here span fifty years of creativity.

Composed in 1959, Cunningham’s first quartet is a very brief two-movement exploration.  The opening movement is a quick-paced set of variations.  It is followed by a beautifully lyrical “Song and Fantasia”.  This period of music is generally noted as one of experimentation and a further atonal alienation that often can leave listeners rather cold.  Cunningham’s music though tends to continue more along a thread in these early quartets that seems connected more to Bartok, though the harmonic language is quite different.  In his second quartet, with the subtitle “Three Satires”, he explores a host of approaches.  The first movement has a sort of traditional setting of interesting motifs that are tossed about the instruments with some great wit that can be heard, especially as one approaches cadences.  Clusters, a bit of Jazz, and a few South American flavors can be heard in this tightly-knit work.

The third quartet appeared a decade later (1975) and is reflective of a period where composers continually were stripping away the detritus of large forms and honing in on smaller motivic ideas, or thematic development that was more unified across a work.  One can see this in this more classic four-movement quartet where even tempo indications are removed as a designation for a movement.  Here Cunningham explores the development across time where the opening movement’s material is the core from which springs the remaining movements.  This is a rather intriguing concept that is almost like a unique take on variations.  Each movement explores the original line of each instrument as the piece progresses with the final movement inverting the lines such that what was once the cello line is now at the top.

The first disc concludes with the fairly intense fourth quartet, with the subtitle “Interlacings”.  Unlike the linear exploration of ideas in the previous quartet, this one, composed in 1985, weaves together the different lines to create ever-increasing dense texture.  Structurally as well, Cunningham frames two more traditional movements, a scherzo and an adagio.

In his fifth quartet, “Aggregates” (1988), Cunningham moves more perhaps from a contrapuntal exploration, heard in the fourth quartet, to one that will explore denser harmonies.  This work too has an innate intensity that comes from incorporating all 12-tones but without really using a serial compositional approach to their organization.  The emotional direction of the work is communicated with a brief descriptive title for the movement.  Likely a closer set analysis might reveal the way the harmonic results have helped lend a hand in creating some additional shape to this equally intense work.

“Digital Isorhythm” is the subtitle given to Cunningham’s sixth quartet which he states has some structural elements that are “computer assisted”.  It is part of the process of exploring rhythmic augmentation and diminution, a further breakdown of musical elements into their basic form that is then used to form the basis of the work.  Tension is created between the more natural, intuitive, rhythmic and musical expectations and those arrived at through compositional manipulation suggested by a computer.

For what is his last quartet (to date), Cunningham returned to the more traditional exploration one might find in an appropriately subtitle, “Back Home.”  Indeed, we have come full circle to a traditional four-movement work with more formal structure against a relaxed, and perhaps more intuitive, musical language.

The performances here were recorded over the last nine years with five different quartets.  While one might prefer a complete cycle with any single group, these recordings match up fairly well and have been done in such a way that the performers are not quite exploring the works in isolation.  The Sirius Quartet tackles the first two works quite well.  The Moravian Quartet explores pieces that are essentially 30-years apart providing a different perspective perhaps on the shift in style.  The more difficult central quartets were recorded with one ensemble which allowed no doubt proper time to really tackle the difficulties posed by this more modern music.   Cunningham’s music is enthralling.  One can hear the way his own compositional interests evolve across these works that explore the various techniques both of the genre, and theoretical constructs to experiment with along the way.  Each work holds up quite well and this makes the set an important addition to the repertoire.  More interesting for those exploring the composer’s music is to hold up these more personal expressions against his other larger-scale work, some of which has begun appearing on disc.  Highly Recommended.