Bruno Walter: String Quartet, Piano Quintet (CPO)

★★★☆☆

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Context is a surprising factor. Trying by means of a listing of live shows carried out by inmates on the Theresienstadt focus camp between 1942 and 1944, I used to be greatly surprised to discover a chamber work by Bruno Walter. Many of the music carried out was both by main Austrian and Czech names, with a good sampling by composers who had been themselves incarcerated within the camp — Ullmann, Haas, Krasa, Ilse Weber — all destined for deportation to the Auschwitz loss of life camp.

Bruno Walter was an outlier on this firm. A conductor skilled by Gustav Mahler in Hamburg and employed by him in Vienna, Walter roughly gave up composing as his baton profession took off. His string quartet of 1903 is so anachronistic it belongs to the early years of the earlier century. A charitable view could be that it makes an attempt a pastiche of Mozart, however charity solely goes thus far.

Two years on, Walter’s piano quintet was premiered in a Rosé Quartet live performance that includes works by Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander von Zemlinsky. Context rocks us once more. Schoenberg and his brother-in-law had been on the furthest frontline of the avant-garde whereas Walter was lodged, at greatest, in single-digit opus numbers by Robert Schumann. To maintain up with the twentieth century, he added gobbets of chromaticism and a touch of a quartet that Mahler wrote as a child on the Conservatoire.

Walter performed the piano himself on the premiere and made fist of it, by all accounts. Seven years later he gave up composing for good, turning into music director in Munich and Leipzig earlier than migrating in 1939 to the US the place he loved 20 years as an eminence grise.

These two works are, subsequently, not more than curiosities. The Vienna-based Aron Quartet play them with a tad an excessive amount of seriousness, when a wink of irony might need given clearer recognition that the thoughts behind these scores belonged to not a composer however to a really completed musician.

I reviewed a Naxos recording of the piano quintet seven years in the past. This efficiency is barely extra endearing. What I might actually have favored to listen to is what the Rosé Quartet made from this trivial music and, much more intriguing, the way it sounded to the doomed inmates of Theresienstadt.

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Norman Lebrecht is likely one of the most widely-read commentators on music, tradition and cultural politics. He’s a daily presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Avenue Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and different publications. His weblog, Slipped Disc, is among the many most generally learn cultural websites on-line, breaking unique tales and campaigning towards human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.

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