Dip Your Ears, No. 204 (Schulhoff for String Quartet)

E.Schulhoff, SQ4ts Nos.1 & 2, 5 Pieces for SQ4t, Aviv Quartet Naxos

Schulhoff for String Quartet

The string quartets of Schulhoff’s are masterpieces, on par with the best of the 20^th century. If you look or listen beyond the first page of String Quartet No.1 (1924), inauspiciously black with notes and an unisono assault on the listener, things turn immediately to the charming, and then to unbridled fun. The viola friendly quartet features lots of sul ponticello whispering, there are slides, tickles and spider-feet, pizzicato picking, au talon bowing, and col legno knocking… in short: it’s a whole bag of fun and stomps around the block with gusto. I remember hearing the quartet live for the first time with the Dutch EnAccord Quartet and what a revelation that was! Much the same goes for the barn-burning razzmatazz Five Pieces for String Quartet, arguably his best work for string quartet.

The performances here are good and the sound is varying but decent, but the main reason to pick the Aviv Quartet’s renditions on Naxos are availability, economy, and convenience – having both quartets and the Five Pieces in one place. If Capriccio decides to reissue the Petersen Quartett recordings (which cover the complete works for String Quartet except for the Divertimento, plus the Violin Sonata, the Duo, and the Sextet), that will be the obvious first choice with neither sound- nor performance-qualms of any kind.

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Dip Your Ears, No. 202 (Schulhoff on the Piano)

E.Schulhoff, Piano Works: Sonata No.2; Five Pittoresques op.31; Two Pieces; Music for Piano op.35; Esquisses de Jazz, Caroline Weichert Grand Piano

E.Schulhoff, Sonatas Nos.1 & 3; Improvisations de Jazz; 5 Burlesques op.23; 5 Grotesques op.21; Five Pittoresques op.31; Ironies op.34 et al., M.Babinsky Phoenix UK | DE | FR

Sonatas and other Rarities

With deft tenacity, humor, and grit, Caroline Weichert does her part to bring Erwin Schulhoff’s piano works to life in her Schulhoff-survey which includes Pittoresken (of which “In futurum” is a part). Keith Jarrett could have been inspired by Schulhoff’s Second Sonata; its slow movement especially is a dreamy slice of quasi-improvisatory bliss. Mechanical rigor sits easily side by side with Jazz influences in Esquisses de Jazz and catchy Charleston comes with classical variation forms.

Margarete Babinsky (with her partners where four hands are needed) is equally enticing on her 2 CD disc and complements Weichert’s second volume very well. The first sonata, dedicated to Thomas Mann, could be placed anywhere on an imagined continuum between Prokofiev and Antheil. The Jazz Improvisations are amazingly effective good-mood music, impossibly charming and unabashedly easy on the ears. If hotel lobby pianism wasn’t the prerogative of hell, but heaven, it might sound like this.

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Dip Your Ears, No. 200 (Schulhoff Symphonies for Voice)

E.Schulhoff + A.Zemlinsky, Two Symphonies for Voice & Orchestra: Menschheit, Landschaften + Six Maeterlinck Songs, M.Tang / R.Stene / Trondheim SO Simax

Voluptuous Melancholy

Landschaften – Symphony for Mezzo and Orchestra, op.26, is a 16-minute orchestral song cycle from 1912 that Schulhoff dismissed later when he changed his style after World War I… but what a glorious work to dismiss! Mahler or Zemlinsky might have been jealous, so expansive in concentrated form, so soaring is this work on five poems of Johannes Theodor Kuhlemann that Schulhoff called a. Schulhoff revisited the idea of a “Symphony for Voice and Orchestra” after the war, when he wrote Menschheit, op.28, with a completely different idea about composing and yet achieved similarly pleasingly late-romantic results.

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Jerusalem Quartet in Charm City

Schubert, Quartet ("Death and the Maiden"), Jerusalem Quartet (Harmonia Mundi, 2008) [Review]

Charles T. Downey, Despite some weather delays, Jerusalem Quartet lights up Shriver (Washington Post, February 17)

The frigid cold may have kept some listeners home, but it did not deter the Jerusalem Quartet from playing at Shriver Hall on Sunday evening. The ensemble arrived in Baltimore only a short time before the concert, because of weather-related flight troubles, and the cellist, whose suitcase was lost, wore jeans — but when they played, all cares were forgotten.

Haydn’s “Rider” Quartet (op. 74/3) was ideally crisp and light in style... [Continue reading]

Jerusalem Quartet
Music by Haydn, Schulhoff, Schubert
Shriver Hall (Baltimore, Md.)

SEE ALSO:
Tim Smith, Jerusalem Quartet makes Shriver Hall debut (Baltimore Sun, February 17)

PREVIOUSLY:
Schumann with Alexander Melnikov | Shostakovich
Wolf Trap in 2012 | Library of Congress in 2007 (interrupted)
JCCGW in 2006 | Kennedy Center in 2005

Best Recordings of 2014 (#2)

Time for a review of classical CDs that were outstanding in 2014 (published in whole on Forbes.com). My lists for the previous years: 2013, 2012, 2011, (2011 – “Almost”), 2010, (2010 – “Almost”), 2009, (2009 – “Almost”), 2008, (2008 - "Almost") 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004.

# 2 - New Release

Thomas Larcher, A Padmore Cycle, What Becomes, Poems, Tamara Stefanovich, Thomas Larcher (piano), Mark Padmore (tenor), Harmonia Mundi

T.Larcher, A Padmore Cycle, What Becomes, Poems, T.Stefanovich, T.Larcher, M.Padmore Harmonia Mundi

The Power of the Well-Prepared Piano

I knew Thomas Larcher [on Twitter] as a pianist, primarily from one of my very favorite piano recordings, the Three Piano pieces of both Schubert and Schoenberg (ECM [on Twitter]). Now, a little late to the party, I know him as a composer, too—with a release that has gripped and fascinated upon first listening as much as it does now, a good dozen times later. Thomas Larcher writes in the (excellent and funny) liner notes that he “had wanted for a long time to get away from the piano’s natural sound… Over time I associated this sound… with a sense of something… obsolete, at a dead-end.”

What doesn’t bode well—if you’ve ever heard a modern work in which a violin is stroked on the rim of a pasta pot (not that I have; I’m exaggerating for effect), you know what I mean about gratuitously using instruments against their intended ways—turns out most delightful. A well-prepared piano still works along the lines inherent to the nature of its sound-production (whereas amplified power-drilling into one of its legs might not be such an “inherent way”) and brings out its nature as the percussion instrument it is. So much about the whimsy and feisty two opening short pieces entitled Smart Dust, music that appeals like the most accessible of John Cage rubbing up to Gia Kancheli (if that is helpful).

After that, Larcher turns back to the conventional piano, the Poems and the Leif Ove Andsnes-inspired and Tamara Stefanovich-performed What Becomes. The opening of “Frida falls asleep” (Poems) has all the catchiness of a Van Halen riff and on a dime it turns into meditative mood that would befit Erik Satie. Both works prove to be lyrically seductive, contemplative, and occasionally ardent. These insinuated qualities are also plenty present in the real heart of the disc, the Padmore Cycle song-cycle (curiously commissioned by the Alois Lageder winery, not a concert venue or performer), as are neat dissonances and strewn-in shards of anguish. Tenor Mark Padmore throws himself into ‘his’ cycle with his typical abandon and artistry; tasteful even in the extremes and by sheer conviction always staying well clear of the naff. The result is modern, yes, but not abrasive but instead wholly absorbing in a way that is easier to feel than to understand.

# 2 – Reissue

Leoš Janáček, Erwin Schulhoff, String Quartets, Talich Quartet, La Dolce Volta 256

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