Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942)
Piano Concerto, Op.11 (1913)
Der Bürger als Edelmann (1926)
Michael Rische (piano)
WDR Symphony Orchestra/Israel Yinon (Concerto)
Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Belin/Gerd Albrecht (Der Bürger)
rec. 1998/99, Cologne Philharmonie; Jesus-Christus-Kirche, Berlin Dahlem
HÄNSSLER HC21042 [52]
Don’t confuse Schulhoff’s Op.11 Piano Concerto for the much better known and brilliantly jazzy Op.43. This is an early work composed in 1913 when Schulhoff was around 20, having recently graduated from Cologne Conservatory where his teachers included Steinbach, the great Brahmsian, for composition and Carl Friedberg for piano. He had earlier been a Reger pupil and it’s always tempting to hear Reger in Schulhoff’s music of this time. The Concerto certainly has a strongly individual slant with a mixture of insouciance and quirkiness that keeps things alive. Phrasing and key signatures alike are subject to a certain whimsical imagination, cemented by some naughty twists and turns of a decidedly serio-comic nineteenth century quality. Schulhoff manages a post-adolescent trick of being both mocking and subverting expectations. His piano writing is clean and clear, possibly excepting an overlong first movement cadenza which is dispatched with enviable flair here by Michael Rische. The brief central movement is illuminated by charming exchanges between the piano and the orchestra before the Rondo finale is unleashed, more a case of rhythmic vitality and high spirits than anything more demanding. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be full of fancy and giocoso high spirits, of course.
When he was in his early thirties Schulhoff composed incidental music to Der Bürger als Edelmann, intended as an updated version of Le bourgeois gentilhomme, which two years later he arranged as a concert suite for piano, seven wind instruments and percussion. He played the piano at the premiere and Hermann Scherchen conducted. This is what’s performed here. Schulhoff was selected as a composer who could use contemporary vernacular effectively, who had a solid command of dance idioms and I suppose what one could call Euro-Jazz of the time – hot dance band music, if you will. He could also write with dignity and solemnity when the occasion demanded, as it does in the work’s Overture. In the subsequent dance movements, he unleashes a full range of knowing gestures, generating theatrical heat a-plenty. His handling of percussion is especially fine. The longest movement is the last, with its succession of dances following one after the other, offering plenty of scope for variety, Stravinsky-style, from boxers, critics, philosophers and parvenus.
Both these scores are essentially light-hearted, the concerto youthful and vibrant, the concert suite feasting on the many opportunities for variation in dance rhythms through the use of the tango and waltz among others. Rische is again primus inter pares here and Israel Yinon, in the concerto, and Gerd Albrecht direct with authority. Rische in fact was in his mid-30s when he made these recordings and is now 60; the Schulhoff brace dates from sessions made in 1998-99. I’m not sure if they have been released before but it’s good to make their acquaintance in such vibrant performances.
Jonathan Woolf
