GMCD 7261 You can order this CD in our E-Shop under Chamber Music Reviews ***Sound Clips***	Stravinsky -Von Einem - Engel Violin & Piano Duos / Piano Trio Christos Kanettis - Violin Alfons Kontarsky - Piano Reinhard Latzko - Cello Violin: Giovanni Grancino – Milano 1697 Piano: Steinway Concert grand D – Nr. 274 Cello: Michele Deconet,Venezia 1750 in cooperation with

Contents:

DDD Recorded: Bayerischer Rundfunk Studio II, Munich 25, 26 & 28 February 2002 Total Time = 73:47

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971):
Divertimento

Sinfonia
Swiss Dances
Scherzo
Pas de deux – Variation - Coda

By the late 1920s Stravinsky’s reputation as a musical radical, established the previous decade through his great ballet scores for Diaghilev’s Ballet Ruse, had been replaced by a general perception that he was an arch-conservative and opponent of the revolutionary ideas being practised by adherents of the Second Viennese School.  Even Diaghilev seemed to regard Stravinsky as too traditionalist and had turned to other, more adventurous composers, for his latest scores.  So when Ida Rubinstein, who had started a ballet company in direct opposition to the Ballet Ruse, asked Stravinsky for a new score he eagerly accepted.  We cannot discount the likelihood that Stravinsky saw this both as an opportunity to express his opposition to current trends in music as well as a snub to Diaghilev, but his principal reason for accepting the commission was the fact that it coincided with the 35^th anniversary of Tchaikovsky’s death and thereby offered a chance to pay homage to the man Stravinsky regarded as the greatest composer of all for the Russian stage.  He based the score around eight of Tchaikovsky’s short piano pieces as well as a few of his songs and the completed ballet, based on one of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories The Fairy’s Kiss, was premièred in Paris on 27^th November 1928.  It was the longest ballet score Stravinsky ever produced and in later years he was less than enthusiastic about the Tchaikovsky pieces he had used in it - “Listening the other day to a concert of the saccharine source material for that work I almost succumbed to diabetes” – but at the time his reservations were more concerned with Rubinstein’s choreographic realisation of his score and shortly after the ballet’s première he revised some of the material to create a four-movement Symphonic Divertimento.  In 1932 the violinist Samuel Drushkin collaborated with Stravinsky to rearrange this for violin and piano.

The opening Sinfonia corresponds largely with the first of the ballet’s four scenes, in which a mother with her babe-in-arms struggles through a storm, is chased by some spirits who steal the child, carry him off to a fairy who embraces and kisses him before disappearing and leaving him to be rescued by a group of country folk. Prominent among the Tchaikovsky source material used in this movement is the 10^th of his 16 Children’s Songs Op.54, "Lullaby in a Storm.”  The Swiss Dances correspond to the first part of the ballet’s second scene, in which the child, now grown into a young man, is dancing with his fiancée at a country fair.  Left alone the young man is approached by the fairy disguised as a gypsy woman who tells his fortune.  Tchaikovsky’s Humoresque (Op.10 No.2) and Natha-valse (Op.51 No.4) form the basis for this movement.  The Scherzo picks up the action of the ballet in the latter part of Scene Three in which, having been led to an old mill by the fairy, the young man finds his fiancée playing games with her friends.  He then dances with her (Pas de deux), she dances a solo (Variation) and she then puts on her wedding veil (Coda).   

Gottfried von Einem (1918-1996):

Sonata for Violin and Piano (Op.11)

Allegro moderato
Larghetto
Allegro

Although von Einem’s reputation rests largely on his music for the stage - five ballet scores and seven operas – he also wrote around a dozen chamber works, all except one composed during the last 15 years of his life.  That one exception is the Sonata for Violin and Piano composed in 1949 and first performed at that year’s Salzburg Festival.  As with Stravinsky and his Divertimento, von Einem used the Sonata to demonstrate his opposition to the trends of his Austrian and German contemporaries.  More than that, though, it represents the victorious culmination of von Einem’s unwavering opposition to the Nazi party and their policy of declaring certain composers and their music as “degenerate”.

Born in Berne where his father was serving as military attaché at the Austrian embassy, Gottfried von Einem was educated in Austria, Germany and England and from his very earliest childhood was determined to pursue a career in music.  At the age of 20 he was appointed a coach with the Berlin Staatsoper and, later, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, but despite having composed his first music at the age of 11 it was not until he was into his 20s that he began to study composition seriously with the composer Boris Blacher.  It was his continued relationship with Blacher – whom the Nazis had labelled a “degenerate” composer – as well as his willingness to assist Jews to escape Nazi Germany that led to his being arrested, interrogated and imprisoned by the Gestapo.  His operas, four of which were to librettos by Blacher, expressed his belief in personal freedom and opposition to the kind of politics espoused by the Nazis and following the huge success of the first of these, Dantons Tod, at the Salzburg Festival in 1947, von Einem was appointed to the board of the festival (later becoming its chairman). 

Von Einem’s blend of jazz, popular tunes, biting rhythms and occasional bursts of atonality, which some have described as “naïve and primitive”, is nowhere more vividly displayed than in the Sonata.  A bluesy violin theme against a jabbing rhythmic figure from the piano characterises the first movement, the second, with its bleak violin melody against a sparse piano accompaniment often consisting merely of a single countermelody, is strongly flavoured by Shostakovich, while the third, with its vigorous violin ostinato and Latin-American dance rhythms from the piano eventually turns into pure jazz culminating with the appearance of the song, originally composed by Harry Warren and made famous by Louis Armstrong in the 1938 movie Going Places, “Jeepers Creepers”. 

Paul Engel (b.1949):

Born into a well-known family of musicians in Reutte in the Austrian Tyrol Paul Engel studied composition (with Günter Bialas and Wilhelm Killmayer), conducting (with Jan Koetsier, Fritz Schieri and Wolfgang Winkler) and piano (with Rosl Schmid and Volker Banfield) at the Munich Hochschule für Musik where he subsequently joined the academic staff teaching theory, analysis, aural training and chamber music.  Since 1987 he has been working as a freelance composer writing operas (including Daniel first staged at the Munich Staatstheater in 1994, and a chamber opera Boehlendorff for the 1998 Nordsee Organ Festival), orchestral music (including three symphonies, Glade Enlightened premièred at the Cardiff Festival of 20^th Century Music in 1983, An Jupiter a homage to Mozart on the 200^th anniversary of his death, and Hannibal’s Elephants which was premièred in Cologne in 1999) and chamber music.  Indeed chamber music has been central to Engel’s output since 1978 when his involvement with a piano trio led him to a deep appreciation of the chamber works of the great 18^th century Viennese masters.  “Their clear structures and the tonal peculiarities of the instruments then available represented for me a source of endless fascination.  From that grew the idea to combine musical material from that epoch with the mental and emotional aspects of music of our time”.

Originally written in 1990 and revised in 2000 for Alfons Kontarsky and Christos Kanettis, Sonogramm I opens with decidedly Beethovenian chords, low in the piano’s register, the violin introducing a majestic theme which gradually moves away from the initially unambiguous sense of tonality into, firstly, more ambiguous tonality and eventually into decidedly atonal territory with an impassioned central climax involving crashing piano clusters and frantic violin passagework.  This is followed by a sprightly, strongly chromatic, dance which gradually slows down, passes through a dazzling passage of strong major tonality to end abruptly in with dark chords from the piano and a low, repeated violin note.  Engels describes this as being “like real life.  One lives through phases of quiet and calm, then bursts of rapid activity hurrying to and fro.  It all seems imponderable.”

Engel’s fifth Piano Trio Calliope’s descent from Olympus is based on an imaginary meeting between the Greek God Zeus and his muse of Epic Poetry, Calliope (known as the “Fair Voiced”).  “In view of the terribly hectic pace of modern life it seems to me timely to look again at ancient mythology, which can enable us, perhaps only very fleetingly, to see into the minds of the ancients.  We have grown dependent on technical remedies which stifle our capacity to think more deeply over our art, allowing the trivial to occupy our precious time.  My fifth Piano Trio uses tonality to achieve cohesion, revitalizes melody, employs harmony in the best sense of the word to be ‘harmonious’, and a constant pulse which allows everything to be perceived along a level horizontal plain.”

The music follows Engel’s own clearly defined programme.  Against a single repeated high piano note the strings gently interweave to depict the “comfortable peace in an environment of immaculate beauty and harmony high on Mount Olympus.“  Subterranean rumbles from the piano emerge; “Below, in the Hellenic empire, life carries on in its confused way”.  An athletic duet between violin and piano occasionally joined by the cello represents “Calliope receiving out Zeus’ commands”.  The pace quickens as Calliope descends into the world of mortals which “shakes with powerful pains.  With an effort Calliope succeeds in her flight to this world” and she travels to Delphi where she “meets poets and artists and tells them of Zeus’ warnings and concerns for their future.  Exhausted by this Calliope stretches out and sleeps.”  Calliope returns to Mount Olympus but whether the Hellenic people have heeded Zeus’ warnings remains unclear, the work “ends in uncertainty”. 
© Marc Rochester 2002

Page revised 30.06.03