Try a few bars of this
music with your most innocent ear; Mendelssohn,
Schumann, Brahms perhaps? All and none,
because not a bar of this comes anywhere
near those composers. They might have
approved of it from their competent
students – as student works – but would
hardly have admitted it to their own
œuvres.
Something of a surprise,
then, that anybody should have bothered
to record these works but a bigger shock
are the years of composition: 1942 to
47. There is nothing on this CD that
would have surprised a Viennese salon
audience of 1870, except perhaps the
complete absence of anything vaguely
Wagnerian. There’s no pastiche here,
no hint of irony; it simply seems that
Franke had to compose, and he really
only wanted to compose in the style
of the teachers of his own teachers.
Had the works on this
disc turned out to be excellent examples
of that style, we might have had a debate
on whether such extreme anachronisms
have a place, but this is far from being
the case. While the processing of the
material is competent and the writing
idiomatic for the instruments, the basic
material, the ideas, are poverty-stricken
in the extreme. I can’t recall one memorable
phrase on the whole CD. Perhaps, in
frustration, I’m exaggerating; the second
movement andante of the D major
Trio starts sweetly enough. But not
much! I really wanted to say to this
composer, ‘you’re obviously competent,
try a little discord here or there,
some harmonic spice’. After all, Franke
lived in Darmstadt from 1950 to 1971;
although the liner notes say that he
was always interested in the work of
other composers, we must assume that
he did not attend the summer schools
where Messiaen, Stockhausen, Boulez
et al taught over those very same years.
I felt a little sad
that 90% of Franke’s output (869 works
in the catalogue!) was destroyed in
the Dresden bombing of February 14,
1945 but I don’t think we have missed
much.
I should say that the
musicians play excellently on a good
recording and I look forward to hearing
them in music more worthy of their abilities.
Roger Blackburn
Klaus Opitz (viola) 