Customer Reviews

Jacobi: Concerto for Cello & Orchestra/Hagiographa/Ballade for Violin and Piano/String Quartet No. 3

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The Jacobi music is refreshing both Biblical and modern. Concerto for Cello and Orchestra is beautifully done by the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra under William Strickland. Irene Jacobi played the piano for Ballade for Violin and Piano. I wonder if she is a daughter as it was composed in 1942. I bought it for the Claremont String Quartet's Hagiographa. It is a romp. The musicians are not in Int'l Who's Who of Music & Musicians. American Masters is an excellent, low cost series from Composers

Recordings Inc.

I first encountered the name of Frederick Jacobi, along with those of Marion Bauer, Emerson Withorne and Louis Gruenberg in the essential book of Carol Oja on Music Modernism in New York in the 1920s (Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s), in the chapter about the moderate modernists, .

Well, there is not much that is modernist in the music contained on this CRI disc, even moderately. By the 1930s Jacobi had rediscovered his Jewish roots and turned to subjects inspired by the Ancient Testament. Maybe he relinquished what had been modern in his previous writing, in favor of a mainstream Romantic style whose main influences seem to be Dvorak and Brahms. Indeed this is the influence one hears in the Cello Concerto from 1932 and, compared to Bloch's Shelomo and other "Hebraic" compositions, the Jewish flavor is very moderate. Again in Hagiographa (Holy Writings) from 1938, a quintet for Piano and Strings depicting the plights of Job, the moods of Ruth and the battle of Jericho, Brahms and Dvorak come to mind, peppered here and there with a little Franck and a fair amount of Bloch (especially in the middle movement). The Ballade for Violin & Piano from 1942 is the most Blochian - but it is the mild Bloch of Baal Shem rather the brutal and angry one of the 1st Violin and Piano Sonata, and it is also some 20 years after Bloch's masterpieces. It is the 3rd String Quartet from 1945 that is the most advanced in its language, at least in its outer movements and parts of the slow movement (the bristling scherzo is again more traditionally post-Franckian, and the more lyrical moments of the slow movement tritely Brahms-Dvorak in style), dramatic and vehement in mood, tonal with some dissonance in its composional technique - it is the language of Bloch in his 3rd to 5th String Quartets from the early fifities. But Jacobi's would have been more modern and memorable, had he written it twenty years earlier.

CRI's production information is shamefully scanty, and faulty anyway. Originally the String Quartet and Ballade came on CRI SD 146 (not the Cello Concerto) with Jacobi's Fantasy for Viola and Piano from 1941 (played by Louise Rood, viola and Irene Jacobi, piano). That was released in mono in 1961, with the stereo version appearing only in 1970. The Concerto and Hagiographa came on CRI CD 174 (and not the Ballade), in 1963. A good discography of Jacobi by Anton Wagner can be found on the net, and this is where I found this info.