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Classic FM
May 2008
Right Through the Bone
Music by Julius Röntgen
ARC Ensemble
‘Right through the bone’—that’s how Edvard Grieg described the music of German-Dutch composer Julius Röntgen (1855-1932), a now forgotten figure who counted Liszt and Brahms among his admirers. And the basic soundworld of Röntgen’s music rebounds out of Brahms, with a clear sense of lyricism unfolding through sumptuous chromatic harmonies. But Röntgen’s music also had an ear to the future—the opening Piano Quintet (1921) might be unashamedly Brahmsian but a 1931 String Sextet shows awareness of Schoenberg’s pre-atonal melodic arcs. These are obsessively catchy performances from the ARC Ensemble (Artists of The Royal Conservatory of Canada), especially in an oddball Clarinet Trio that’s as quirky as quirky gets.
–Philip Clark
Evening Standard (London)
January 10, 2007
Weinberg: On the threshold of hope
ARC Ensemble (RCA Red Seal)
4/5 Stars
Mieczyslaw (Moishe) Weinberg (1919-1996) was the composer closest to Shostakovich, each playing the other his new works before committing them to print. When Weinberg was arrested in the last weeks of Stalin’s terror, Shostakovich wrote to the NKVD chief Beria protesting his innocence. Weinberg, a prolific symphonist, is at his most expressive in chamber works that he imbued with echoes of contemporary Jewish suffering.
His 1945 clarinet sonata, played here by Joaquin Valdepenas and Dianne Werner, is a miniature masterpiece, combining a klezmer-like improvisatory spirit within a strict formal structure. The 1944 piano quintet bears kinship to a prior work in the same form by Shostakovich. Both are melodic, ironic, and disrupted by passages of panicky agitation; Weinberg, however, finds a soft ending.
These revealing performances, by members of The Royal Conservatory of Music, are testimony to a Soviet composer’s courage, ingenuity and, in the clarinet sonata, near-genius.
Musical Opinion
July-August 2008
Music in Exile
Under the heading Music in Exile, the Canadian Royal Conservatory of Music presented at Cadogan Hall a weekend of concerts and lectures exploring the world of composers forced in the 1930s to flee from Germany and Austria by the oppressive regime of the Third Reich, many of whom found sanctuary in Britain and the USA.
The final concert on 13 April concluded with Through Roses, a music drama for actor and eight instrumentalists by the contemporary American composer Marc Neikrug that takes its inspiration from the experiences of musicians forced to perform in the concentration camps. Specifically it is based on the recollections of the fictitious violinist and Auschwitz survivor Carl Stern, who worked as a camp gardener and witnessed the fate of his fellow inmates through a rose hedge.
Played by the actor Saul Rubinek, himself born in a refugee camp after World War II, Stern is portrayed as an old man living in a cluttered room in New York, his treasured violin linking him to memories of the past that haunt him, but to which he clings, pathetically. First seen in pyjamas in bed, he gets up, puts on his tail coat and hat, picks up his violin as though setting off to a concert, but thoughts of a concentration-camp life come floating back. Intermittently, he sleeps in his armchair then wakes, to remember the other camp inmates for whom he played, the sick in hospital, the dead, the children, the smoking chimneys, the commandant who appreciated great music, and his wife, who cultivated the garden outside their house, bordered by a hedge of roses. As he drifted in and out of sleep, his words were not always clear and the music took over his recollections with its echoes of Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, and others, pieces that he might well have played in the camp, integrated into Neikrug’s own evocative writing. The composer conducted the eight musicians of the English Chamber Orchestra Ensemble, led by Stephanie Gonley, and Saul Rubinek directed his own telling, shambling, moving performance amid the cluster of furniture positioned in front of the musicians. Through Roses is an effective piece of music theatre, composed in 1979-80, premiered in New York, and to date has been performed in 15 countries.
–Margaret Davies
Mieczyslaw Weinberg
On the Threshold of Hope: Chamber Music
The New York Times
January 2007
Many European Jewish composers fled west to avoid Nazi persecution, but the Polish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who died in 1996, went east. Moves to Minsk, Belarus, in 1939 and Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1941 both saved his life (his family in Warsaw was killed in the Holocaust) and resulted in a lifelong friendship with Shostakovich.
Mr. Weinberg’s music, like the chamber works on this new recording, reveals both his Jewish roots and the influence of Shostakovich. This disc, featuring admirable performances by the members of the ARC Ensemble (Artists of The Royal Conservatory, Toronto), takes its title from the brief period of relative freedom enjoyed by Jews in the Soviet Union during World War II. Then Stalin’s anti-Semitic postwar purges squashed hope on the threshold; Mr. Weinberg was arrested in 1953, but Shostakovich intervened on his behalf.
The highlight of this disc is a fiery reading of Mr. Weinberg’s intense five-movement Piano Quintet (Op. 18), written in 1944. It opens with a warmly lyrical melody soon tempered by dissonance and angst. But Mr. Weinberg is playfully satirical where Shostakovich might have been bitterly sardonic. The intense Allegretto offers by turns dense, wild climaxes; spare, staccato textures; and gentle lyricism. The ensuing Presto sounds like café music spun through a carnival funhouse. An introspective Largo leads to the spiky, driven Allegro agitato, with a jagged folk dance and earlier thematic material winding through it.
In the three-movement klezmer-tinged Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (Op. 28), written in 1945, Joaquin Valdepenas plays the virtuoso clarinet part with flair, and the pianist Dianne Werner provides sensitive accompaniment. Also included here are Mr. Weinberg’s “Jewish Songs” (Op. 17), set to Yiddish poems by Shmuel Halkin. The songs, one of which alludes to the 1941 massacre at Babi Yar, are given tender and passionate readings by Richard Margison.
–Vivien Schweitzer
The Strad
August 2008
ARC Ensemble performance at Cadogan Hall, London, April 12th and 13th, 2008 with the English Chamber Orchestra Ensemble
It is inevitable that with a retrospective glance to the turbulent years of the 1930s and 1940s, a composer’s music is likely to reflect upheaval and suffering. All four concerts in this weekend entitled Music in Exile depicted traumatic personal loss and displacement in overtly melancholic material that, when grouped together, tended to pall. However, a few works really stood out: Franz Reizenstein’s Piano Quintet op.23 (1948) offers taut invention and well-controlled textures, with a Scherzo that is particularly striking for its moto perpetuo brilliance. Clearly the musical language owes much to his first teacher, Hindemith, but the finale had a poignant personal intensity treated with perceptive artistry by the ARC Ensemble from Canada.
Almost as impressive was Alexander Tansman’s String Sextet, premiered in 1942, which owes much to its dedicatee, Stravinsky. It is frequently complex in its textures, with lyrical sections oscillating with fervent rhythmic figures; the violist Stephanie Gonley was particularly expressive and clear in her direction of the English Chamber Orchestra Ensemble.
Unequivocally the star item was Weinberg’s Piano Quintet (1944). If blindfolded
I’d swear authorship to Shostakovich; at the very least, Weinberg’s great
mentor and friend seems to have had a strong influence on the inspiration. The
ARC Ensemble gave a totally compelling and authoritative reading, particularly
eloquent in the Largo, a threnody to the war dead. Even in the musical language
is derivative, the composition is excellent enough to deserve a permanent place
in the repertoire.
–Joanne Talbot.
Sunday Telegraph
March 30, 2008
EXILES’ RICH REWARD
A Short Music Festival Reveals How Hitler Helped the Jews Thrive
“Hitler was my best friend,” said Walter Cook, of the New York Institute of Arts, in the 1930s. “He shakes the tree and I collect the apples.” Falling to earth almost everywhere outside continental Europe, refugees and emigrés from Nazism became such an integral part of intellectual and cultural life that it is hard to imagine our world without their legacy. But the frequent smoothness of their assimilation into society also makes it easy to forget the trauma of those times. The twin anniversaries of 2008—75 years since Hitler’s rise to power, 70 years since Kristallnacht—are thus a fitting occasion for the kind of musical reflection due in a fortnight’s time at London’s Cadogan Hall, where its Music in Exile weekend offers concerts and lectures devoted to composers persecuted by the Third Reich.
Presented by Toronto’s Artists of The Royal Conservatory ensemble in association with the English Chamber Orchestra, the programmes have been devised by ARC’s founding artistic director, Simon Wynberg. He insists that he is not personally motivated, despite his family’s fate at the hands of the Nazis, and regards this work as only one strand in ARC’s varied activities, but he is well qualified to explore issues of the diaspora. Growing up in Johannesburg, he left South Africa in the 1970s to avoid military conscription and launched his career as a guitarist and scholar from Britain. Before joining The Royal Conservatory in Toronto, Wynberg ran the Guelph Spring Festival, one of many institutions founded by Canada’s most productive musical emigré, Nicholas Goldschmidt.
Is there something fitting about Music in Exile coming from such a cosmopolitan city as Toronto? “In a way,” says Weinberg, “though during the war, Canada was notably awful. Between 1933 and 1945, only 5,000 people were allowed into the whole country. It’s only in recent times that Canada has become so welcoming and cosmopolitan. Previously it was very waspish and white. But in doing these programmes over the past 18 months in Toronto, where nowadays there’s that strong Canadian ideal of fairness and equity, I’ve felt that a lot of people have seen it as a way of addressing a wrong.”
Far from wiping out Jewish influence on culture, Hitler ensured that it spread. The uniquely Austro-German musical tradition enriched everyone else immeasurably. “It is an irony that by trying to destroy the Jews, Hitler made their power in the arts much stronger.” But Music in Exile will avoid the biggest names, such as Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Weill. Indeed, it avoids anything really obvious, and opens with a fascinating programme devoted to the non-Jewish German composers who, as Wynberg says, “were friendly with the wrong people” and forced into “internal exile.”
The best-known name here is Walter Braunfels, represented by some songs and his String Quintet, but even he is familiar, mostly because of a ground-breaking recording of his opera Die Vogel in Decca’s seminal Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) series. Its producer, Michael Haas, is one of several speakers at the weekend, and the list also includes Gottfried Wagner, the outspoken great-grandson of Richard Wagner.
Though America may have lured the most famous names in arts and science, Britain was probably the greatest beneficiary. The Glyndebourne and Edinburgh Festivals could hardly have happened without Rudolph Bing, Carl Ebert, and Fritz Busch. Other musical figures who landed in Britain included Karl Rankl, Egon Wellesz, Walter Goehr, Hans Keller and Peter Stadlen (one-time music critic of The Daily Telegraph). Broaden the field a little, and the list includes Ernst Gombrich, Nikolaus Pevsner, George Weidenfield, Claus Moser, Siegmund Freud, Kurt Schwitters, and Gerard Hoffnung.
So perhaps the “Continental Britons” concert has special interest here, a programme ranging from Robert Kahl, a Brahms acolyte, to Franz Reizenstein, a pupil of Hindemith who went on to study with Vaughan Williams. Even this concert includes two British premieres—a state of affairs that says much about the need for these Music in Exile events.
–John Allison
The Strad
June 2008
Julius Röntgen (1855-1932), younger brother of Wilhelm, the scientist who discovered x-rays and won a Nobel Prize in 1901, was a composer out of his time. All four works on this recording date from the last decade of his life, yet there is nothing here (apart, perhaps, from the eerie semitonal clashes that open the Viola Sonata’s third movement) that would have sounded remotely out of place in Brahms’s music of the 1880s. The gentle off-beat piano chords that open the Clarinet Trio continue where the first movement of Brahms’s E minor Cello Sonata leaves off, while the pizzicato-accompanied textures of the Sextet’s andante second movement inhabit the same world as the Scherzo from Brahms’s Second Sextet. The effect at times is uncannily as though one were discovering a new piece by the grand master himself.
Yet Röntgen was very much his own man and has the habit of coming up with an idea that once heard is difficult to expunge from the memory—the opening ostinato of the Piano Quintet, for example, with its rocking cello pizzicatos, agitated viola figurations and clouded piano textures, supporting ravishing violin lines of long-breathed purity. Music of this quality cries out for exemplary musicianship, and the ARC Ensemble (musicians from The Royal Conservatory of Music, Canada) sets the skin rippling at every turn with its ear-tingling corporate intonation and magical phrasing, caught to perfection by award-winning producer David Frost. It seems invidious to single out an individual member of this remarkable ensemble for special praise, but violinist Erika Raum, who leads both the quintet and sextet, had me hanging on to her every note. This is a sensational release.
–Julian Haylock
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