(++++) BY ONES, TWOS AND THREES

Korngold: Piano Trio in D, Op. 1; Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 6; Tanzlied des Pierrot. Bruno Monteiro, violin; Miguel Rocha, cello; João Paulo Santos, piano. Et’cetera Records. $15.

Moshe Shulman: Secret Messages II; Dave Ballou: Samskara; for vibraphone and trumpet; Jeffrey Stadelman: Koral 17; Koral 18; Koral 1; Dafnis Prieto: Trail of Memories; Emil Harnas 2: Ice Fishing in Kanona. Jon Nelson, trumpet; Tom Kolor, percussion. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     Although the classical music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) has undergone something of a revival in recent years, it remains comparatively obscure, possibly because he is known primarily for the film scores he created in the United States after fleeing Europe during the Nazi era. Interestingly, Korngold in his early career was something of a prodigy, and even his first few compositions have a great deal to recommend them – as is made abundantly clear in a very well-played new CD from Et’cetera Records. The disc opens with Korngold’s first published work and his only piano trio – a work that is something of a marvel, considering the fact that he completed it when he was only 13. The trio was written when Korngold was studying with Alexander Zemlinsky, and it contains both late-Romantic intensity and high levels of lyricism. It also has some clever compositional elements, notably an almost circular structure, with the work’s opening theme repeated and reworked at the conclusion of the finale. Although it is easy to hear echoes of Brahms and Richard Strauss in the music, there is nothing overtly imitative in it, and its harmonic language is right in line with what would be expected for its time period (1909-10). As a whole, this is a strongly accented, atmospheric work created with compositional skill far beyond its composer’s chronological age. And although the style is scarcely distinctive, the stretching of tonality and expressive intensity of the music place it squarely at the end of the Romantic era and show that even in his earliest music, Korngold had a knack for mixing emotive sensitivity with a high degree of drama – a combination that would stand him in good stead in his much later film works. The performance by João Paulo Santos, Bruno Monteiro and Miguel Rocha is first-rate, allowing the music to flow naturally throughout and explore the full emotional range that Korngold put into it, which is considerable even when it sounds somewhat formulaic in the Larghetto third movement. And Korngold matured quite rapidly from a compositional point of view, as is clear from his Sonata for Violin and Piano, written when he was all of 16. Larger-scale than the Piano Trio, this 40-minute sonata strives constantly to burst the bounds within which Korngold created it. Monteiro and Santos tackle the work’s very considerable technical demands with consummate skill, allowing its frequent contrasts of lyricism and intensity to produce the clear and sometimes jarring effects for which Korngold strove – precursors in a way to the quick mood shifts he was later so adept at producing for films. The free-range emotional elements here flow more naturally than in the Piano Trio, although the musical language itself is somewhat more acerbic. The sonata’s second movement, an insistent Scherzo, contains an unusually beautiful central Trio, and the third-movement Adagio is also packed with sincerity despite a high level of chromaticism reminiscent of Mahler and, again, Richard Strauss. The variation-form finale provides the only leavening in a work that is foundationally highly serious: there are tidbits of lightness here and there that help relieve the otherwise persistent weightiness of the sonata, and the gentle conclusion brings with it a sense of calm that is otherwise largely absent from a work of considerable power. The disc concludes, as an encore, with an excerpt from Korngold’s third and best-known opera, Die tote Stadt, a dark psychological work whose rather lurid plot is nowhere reflected in the sweet and warm cello-and-piano version of Tanzlied des Pierrot, played by Rocha and Santos with considerable delicacy and charm. As a whole, this CD stands as testimony to Korngold’s earlier music (which includes Die tote Stadt, at whose première the composer was 23) and an excellent introduction, for listeners who know Korngold only as a film composer, to some of his substantial contributions to 20^th-century chamber music.

     Two-player and three-player works are still favored by some contemporary composers, but they often come in very different forms in the 21^st century from those of the early 20^th. The five composers represented on a New Focus Recordings CD featuring Jon Nelson (trumpet) and Tom Kolor (percussion) use the dual-performer approach in different ways – and employ instruments very differently as well. Moshe Shulman’s Secret Messages II opens with a distinctly electronic sound that soon turns into trumpet clarity and then a series of percussive exclamations from “found objects” such as a table knife and a plastic water bottle. The first Dave Ballou work on the disc, Samskara, is actually a trumpet solo; it has an improvisational feeling throughout, although it never leads anywhere in particular. Ballou’s second piece, for vibraphone and trumpet (titled in all lower case, a not-unusual affectation in contemporary music), is more interesting in its exploration of the two instruments’ sonic contrasts, although it continues in the same vein for rather too long. The three Koral works by Jeffrey Stadelman mix solo and dual performance. Koral 17 is for solo muted trumpet and sounds a bit like a technical étude throughout its one-minute length. Koral 18 is not much longer, about 90 seconds, but uses two players and mixes trumpet interjections with castanets and other rhythm accentuators. Koral 1is for solo percussion – with electronics – and is mainly electronic in sound and accentuation. At five-and-a-half minutes, it shows the limits of this sort of construction, being less effective in toto than the other two Koral entries. The last two works on the CD are the longest by a considerable margin. Dafnis Prieto’s Trail of Memories runs 11-and-a-half minutes and is mainly concerned with sonic contrasts between the trumpet and percussion: its expressivity varies quite a bit over time, but it lacks a clear sense of structure and comes across as a sequence of essentially unconnected vignettes. Ice Fishing in Kanona by Emil Harnas 2 is even longer, more than 12 minutes, and is electroacoustic throughout. It is even more of an acquired taste than the other pieces on the disc, consisting of lengthy silences, numerous outbursts of static, brief forays into something thematic, various now-typical electronic sound clouds, and occasional strong rhythms. Interesting in portions, it becomes tiresome at full length, although the rarefied audience that will find this (+++) CD appealing will likely appreciate its combinatorial elements.