Debussy, Janácek, Hindemith, Cowell: In the Shadow of World War I

Gilbert Kalish Joel Krosnick (Artist), Joel Krosnick (Performer), Henry Cowell (Composer), Claude Debussy (Composer), Paul Hindemith (Composer), Leos Janacek (Composer), Gilbert Kalish (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Joel Krosnick, Gilbert Kalish
• Composer: Henry Cowell, Claude Debussy, Paul Hindemith, Leos Janacek
• Audio CD (April 10, 2009)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Arabesque Recordings
• ASIN: B000007T0I
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #76,153 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

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Debussy, Janácek, Hindemith, Cowell: In the Shadow of World War I by Joel Krosnick, Gilbert Kalish

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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The shadow looms a bit too large - but an interesting program, although the disc's rarity, the Cowell Sonata, is disappointing, May 18, 2007

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Discophage (France) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Debussy, Janácek, Hindemith, Cowell: In the Shadow of World War I (Audio CD)

There is a concept to this disc - purporting to feature works for cello and piano written "in the shadow of World War I" - but the shadow looms a little too large.

Indeed Debussy's Sonata from 1915 and Hindemith's Op. 11 from 1919 can be viewed as permeated by the actuality or remembrance of the Great War. With the war Debussy had turned extremely and narrow-mindedly nationalistic, seeing it as a clash of civilizations and reviling the "musique Boche". The highly enigmatic character, both in form and in mood, of his Sonata can be construed not only as a testimony of his compositional mastery, but also as a reflection of the turmoil of a collapsing world. As for Hindemith's Sonata, it projects an anger and violence in which it is difficult not to hear a cry of protest at the inhuman butchery of the war and the derelict state of post-war Germany.

But Janacek? His "Fairy Tale" was composed as early as 1910 and shows no foreboding I can perceive of the incoming catastrophe - unless you consider that ALL Janacek, with its disjointed construction processes by succession of small melodic cells of high emotional power, is a reflection upon collapse - but then it is more the collapse of the compositional processes inherited from the German classic and romantic traditions than any foreseeable civilization collapse. "Fairy Tale" is an echt-Janacek piece, passionate but pastoral, smacking of Moravian landscapes and atmospheres and as freely constructed and graphically evocative as his operas - arguably every instrumental composition of Janacek could be subtitled "music for an imaginary opera".

Performers' perception of the pieces they play - or their expression of it - is sometimes puzzling. In an interview contained in the liner notes, pianist Gilbert Kalish expresses his frustration with Debussy's Sonata, finding "that it's over too soon", ant that he "can't put [his] hands or mind around everything". At times one senses indeed that the two partners are tempted to over-pour into the piece their own emotive expression rather than letting it just flow naturally out of the notes, but otherwise theirs is fortunately a good rendition, open to the brooding quality of the composition. As for the Hindemith Sonata, the two Ks - Krosnick and Kalish - comment that "from the first movement [they] played it, [they] thought the piece was awful", "filled with shrieking gestures" and had "the feeling that [they] had never heard anything so ugly in [their] lives". Well! How brave of them to go on playing it! But now, c'mon: these two guys, Krosnick as the cellist of the Juillard Quartet and Kalish as the renowned soloist and chamber musician he is, have played tons of highly demanding contemporary music, they've probably at least heard or heard of the works for their instruments by Xenakis, Ferneyhough and the likes - so they should know what is "ugly" in music (and I am not implying that it doesn't yield good music). And this is not even mentioning the National Charles Ives, who went way further than Hindemith in making "ugliness" and cacophony into music. That Hindemith's Sonata could have sounded so to the Beckmessers of his time is quite understandable (and was probably mischievously sought for by the composer). But today? The sonata is a magnificent work: it can be characterized as "angry", "brutal", "urgent", "dramatic" - but certainly not "ugly" or "awful". It is even quite lyrical in the (repressed) anger of its second movement, whose at times enigmatic character is appositely reminiscent of Debussy's Sonata. It is also tonal and tightly controlled, and has an echt-hindemithian raw, motoric energy in its third movement.

These three compositions are not rare items on CD. It is for the Cowell Sonata that I bought this CD. It is an early piece from 1915 (same year as Debussy's), when Cowell was not yet eighteen and basically untrained. It was rediscovered by Krosnick at the bottom of a file box at the Library of Congress (where it was listed as a fragment). I am fascinated with Cowell's early piano music (see my review of Piano Music). On the other hand I found his Violin and Piano Sonata from 1946, heard on Works for Violin by George Antheil; Johanna Beyer; Henry Cowell; Ruth P. Crawford; Charles Dodge; David Mahler, Larry Polansky, Stefan Wolpe, a disappointing work, couched in a backward-looking, Coplandesque prairie-style. So I wanted to hear if something of Cowell's early innovativeness at the piano would be present in the contemporaneous Cello Sonata.

Well - no. To me it sounds as an undigested rehash of loosely tied together Romantic gestures of the most common and trite sort, the kind that ladies of the times would like to hear, head leaning to the side, in the vaporous parlor: sub-par Anton Rubinstein or Elgar, if I may. It even confirms any doubts the scholars may have on the dating of Cowell's early piano pieces (apparently he "backdated" some of them, in an attempt to make them seem even more precociously innovative than they already were): it is simply not credible that such naďve juvenilia would have been composed 3 years AFTER "The Tides of Manaunaun" or a year after "Anger Dance", "Dynamic Motion" or "Advertisement". The only harbinger of the Cowell-to-tcome are two short passages in the finale, where Cowell shows his taste for piercing piano sonorities in the upper range of the keyboard. They last a few seconds.

Anyway, if the shadow of salon Romanticism looms large, I don't hear or see a single trace of a "shadow of the war" in it - no wonder: what would a West coast kid in 1915 know and care of the goings-on in old Europe?

Still, I guess it was useful for Krosnick to dig this one out of the dusty box in the attic - if only to let us judge that this is indeed where it belonged. It is interesting only in showing us where Cowell came from - and how fast he got out of it.