Premier Recording
Max Kuhn (1896-1994)

This CD offers a broad selection of Kuhn’s works. His oeuvre in fact encompasses most genres, from the musico-dramatic to the miniature for piano. His vocal music is however of particular significance. In a review of Kuhn’s songs, the renowned Swiss critic Willi Schuh once wrote of his ‘pronounced lyrical talent’. Besides many songs for voice with piano or orchestral accompaniment, Kuhn composed numerous works for choir, many of them unaccompanied, as in the case of the choral works recorded here. These are his motet Der Mensch lebet und bestehet (Man lives but a little time) and the Missa brevis for double choir a cappella and four vocal soloists. The latter was Kuhn’s second setting of the mass, and was composed between 1951 and 1959. The close of the motet is a chorale on the text of Bach’s ‘Ach, Herr, lass dein lieb Engelein’ from the St John Passion. Both of these works offer ample proof of Kuhn’s contrapuntal gifts. Although he himself was rooted in the Swiss Protestant tradition, the mass in particular bears the traces of Palestrina-style counterpoint that the composer will have studied thoroughly with Jarnach and Stöhr (see for example the beginning of both the Kyrie and the Sanctus). In matters of both harmony and melody, the mass is nevertheless firmly entrenched in the 20^th century. Tonality is ever-present, but is at times considerably extended. Where the text suggests it, Kuhn sometimes employs surprisingly simple harmonic means, as for example in the ‘patrem omnipotentem’ in the Credo, and at ‘Dona nobis pacem’ at the very end of the mass.

Kuhn wrote his Serenata notturna for wind quintet in 1956. He himself offered the following explanatory text: ‘This piece, which is cast in a single movement, begins and ends with the horn call of the night watchman. The work depicts a group of musicians trying to serenade a lady, but being prevented from doing so by the interruption of the night watchman. When he disappears, they thus grasp their chance and let their feelings flow out, giving expression to their high spirits through their music.’ The Serenata was first performed on 1 September 1956, in the Monastery of Ottobeuren in Germany. It was greeted by immediate enthusiasm by the press, with its lyrical tone and its humour receiving particular praise. The Serenata is dedicated to the Swiss clarinettist Hans Rudolf Stalder and his wind quintet. Stalder is also the dedicatee of the Elegie for basset horn and piano, which Kuhn composed in 1965. This work is in seven short movements. The attentive listener will notice fragments of the dies irae sequence in the fourth movement. The last movement is a free recapitulation of the first, with the original 27 bars being telescoped into twelve.

Stylistically speaking, the Elegie is very close to the Five Piano Pieces, though these were written eleven years earlier. Kuhn’s predilection for tarantella-like movements comes to the fore in both works (compare the second movement of each work, for example). One can also see clearly Kuhn’s ability to construct his works with the barest of musical means. In the first of the piano pieces, the sarabande rhythms can be heard in almost every bar; and the third of these pieces comprises little more than a chromatic scale in each hand, moving in contrary motion. Kuhn is fond of playing with symmetries of all kinds - the beginning of the fourth piano piece is another good example. This ‘constructivistic’ side of Kuhn reminds one occasionally of the techniques employed by the composers of the Second Viennese School, though Kuhn himself showed no inclination to indulge in twelve-tone composition himself.

Kuhn wrote as follows about his piano pieces: ‘I: This is in fact a depiction of fear, from its point of origin to its climax and then back again. II: Restlessness and haste. III: Exhaustion and hopelessness. IV: No way to escape fate. V: Struggling on with no prospect of succeeding, pausing for breath, then struggling on again, up to the bitter end.’ These piano pieces are dedicated to the Zurich industrialist and music collector Max Reis.