Schrecker: Chamber Symphony Krenek: Violin Concerto

Schrecker: Chamber Symphony Krenek: Violin Concerto

Track Listings

1. Langsam, schwebend

2. Scherzo, Allegro Vivace

3. A Tempo

4. Landsam, schwabend

5. Presto

6. Adagio molto

7. Allegro vivace

Editorial Reviews
Album Description

FRANZ SCHREKER

Chamber Symphony (1916)

ERNST KRENEK

Concerto for Violin and Orchestra Op. 29 (1924)
Hanna Weinmeister, violin

Musikkollegium Winterthur

Heinrich Schiff, director

Coupling works by Franz Schreker (1878 – 1934) and Ernst Krenek (1900 – 1991) on this CD brings together composers whose biographies have very much in common. This goes much further than the mere fact that, for certain periods between 1916 and 1923, Schreker was Krenek’s teacher; first at the Vienna Academy of Music and then at the Musikhochschule in Berlin. Both hailed from the time of Austro-Hungarian monarchy (Schreker was the son of a photographer, whilst Krenek’s father was a military officer.) They were both influenced by the taste for experimenting and the culture of renewal of the Viennese Sch_nberg circle (Schreker before the First World War, and Krenek in the late twenties.) Under the ideologies of art propounded by the National Socialists both of them were labeled as being "degraded". Schreker broke down und the degradation of the Nazis (when informed of his removal from office in December of 1933 he suffered a stroke from which he did not recover,) and Krenek emigrated to the United States in 1938, taking American citizenship in 1945. We are dealing therefore, with two avant-garde Austrian artists upon whose lives and work the Nazis were to have a damaging, indeed catastrophic effect. Yet the paths that each one took towards musical modernism were quite different.

Schreker’s intellectual background was turn of the century Vienna. His first connections to the Sch_nberg circle were on a personal level. From 1897 Schreker had been studying the violin under Arnold Josef Rosé, who was to give first performances of Schonberg’s chamber music, including the "Verklärte Nacht" of 1899. Since the young student was then only presenting Schreker with smaller works, he was viewed as a sympathiser, but not absolutely as an exponent of Viennese modernism. It was he who conducted the first performance of Sch_nberg’s "Gurrelieder" with the Philharmonic Chorus, which he personally had founded. His first, relatively late success came in 1912, with the opera "Der ferne Klang" The distant sound. After the Great War this was followed by further operas: "Die Gezeichneten" Marked by fate, first performed in Frankfurt in 1918, "The Treasure Hunters" first performed in Frankfurt in 1920, and so on, up to the "Schmied von Genf" The blacksmith of Geneva, the first performance of which in Berlin in 1932, was interrupted by Nazi thugs. The theme of his work is mentioned in the very title of his first success: sound. In the majority of his operas it is the force of the music, the force of the sound, the force of yearning for pure tone, which influences the course of the story. The events on stage are dictated by a clockwork instrument, or a lute or even an organ. So suggestive and ambiguous was this, that Schreker reigned over the German opera houses of the time alongside Richard Strauss. One of the two great instrumental works that he composed: the Chamber Symphony of 1916 for 23 solo instruments, and dedicated to the professorial body (himself among them) of the Royal and Imperial Academy for Music and the Performing Arts in Vienna, drew on this same opulent priority of sound. The première took place in the twelfth of March 1917, with the proceeds going to war-support. The breach from classical tradition that Schreker made with this piece makes a representative piece for study. Lineal thematic development is replaced by purely symbolic sounds. The very beginning of the work depicts a musical space in which melody no longer has a role to play.

In contrast to Schreker with his life-long obsession with sounds, Ernst Krenek shows enormous versatility. The man who was born and who died almost along with the century, left us paintings, had essays published in Karl Kraus’s "Fackel", and his comp

Schrecker: Chamber Symphony Krenek: Violin Concerto, Music, Franz Schreker, Heinrich Schiff

Schrecker: Chamber Symphony Krenek: Violin Concerto

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