Werner Herbers is a serious musician. The photo on the inner
flap of this release certainly gives this impression. Those of
us who remember him as principal oboist of the Concertgebouw
orchestra also remember how the entire orchestra would give the
impression of revolving around him when in the middle of a solo,
such was the intensity which he gave to each performance; indeed,
to each note. As a greenhorn composer just arrived in Amsterdam
in 1987-88 Werner very kindly allowed me to work on the piano
in his house. The piece I was sweating over is long forgotten,
but his generosity lives on in my memory, and as a result he
can do no wrong. Fortunately, even with such a declaration hanging
over this review, it is very easy to have a high regard for Werner
Herbers’ Ebony Band from any objective point of view. His
revival of remarkable and stunning scores from undeserved but
perhaps unsurprising neglect and obscurity have made this band
the vehicle for some uniquely valuable projects. The resonances
which grew out of the Stan Kenton orchestra experiments by composers
such as Robert F. Graettinger have been allowed to echo on into
our times thanks entirely to his efforts.
Kurt Weill’s
Kleine Dreigroschenmusik doesn’t
fall into this class of obscurity, the Threepenny Opera having
retained popularity and notoriety since its conception in 1928.
Weill was forced out of Germany by the forces set in motion through
the rise of Hitler, but the influence of American jazz and other
popular forms can already clearly be heard in the suite which
covers all of the hits from this famous collaboration with Berthold
Brecht. As expected, the Ebony Band play this music with style
and bite, rather sweeping aside the not unattractive but rather
swampily recorded Gulbenkian Orchestra conducted by Michel Swierczewski
on Nimbus. The Ebony Band’s qualities in this music are
more comparable with the old favourite 1970s London Sinfonietta
recording conducted by David Atherton on Deutsche Grammophon.
There are differences in inflection, and Atherton’s trombone
is more fun at times. In terms of stylistic conviction and verve
the Ebony Band is every bit as good however, and in some places
more convincingly European-sounding - some of the London Sinfonietta
tracks could almost be Ealing Comedy rather than Berlin Nightclub.
While the
Kleine Dreigroschenmusik is relatively familiar,
the other two works on this CD most emphatically are not. Another
wartime émigré, Ernst Toch had been a remarkably
well known composer in his brief time in Germany before his career
was interrupted by Nazi domination.
Egon und Emilie is
a satire on opera on a libretto by Christian Morgenstern, whose
humorous and absurdist texts owe something to the kind of material
represented by English eccentrics such as Edith Sitwell. The
piece is a monologue by an operatic diva suffering a nervous
breakdown - the result of being ignored by her largely silent
partner Egon, who finally gives a misogynistic speech, picks
up his things and leaves, granting us the proverb, “Speech
is silver, silence is golden”. One of the inner flaps of
this gatefold package shows the histrionic female giving her
all, while our Egon sits in his evening dress reading a book,
looking for everything like a bourgeois caricature from a George
Grosz cartoon. Recorded in a slightly dry and tubby acoustic,
this is still a decent recording of a very fine performance,
in particular by soprano soloist Elena Vink. The music is of
that anti-romantic New Objective style which is typical of the
period, but poses few difficulties. Indeed, the piece is full
of a kind of jolly wit and humorous inflection, albeit of a rather
Teutonic nature.
Erwin Schulhoff has since the 1990s become a more familiar name,
as one of that unfortunate list of ‘degenerate’ composers
who did not survive the war. This focus on representatives of
the ‘entartete musik’ and Erwin Schulhoff in particular
was one of the strands in which Herbers and the Ebony Band took
a leading role. Their two volumes of his works on Channel Classics
are essential listening for those interested in the period.
H.M.S.
Royal Oak is a Jazz Oratorio, dubbed by the writer and collaborator
Otto Rombach as “an attempt at finding a form for a radio
play which is not limited to the radio.” As such it works
superbly on CD with everything present, and no heavy treading
on the stage to indicate any missed dramatic action. The texts
are all delivered in the original German, but translated in the
booklet. Basically, the events are based on a real story about
a quarrel on board the huge eponymous vessel, three officers
who get themselves into a violent argument about the music played
by a small band who performed in the officers’ mess. The
prelude to all of this was if anything more remarkable, jazz
music having been forbidden by the admiral of the ship, with
an open mutiny following as a consequence.
The piece is full of marvellous moments and colourful jazzy orchestration.
If, for instance, you know Bix Beiderbecke’s ‘Barnacle
Bill the Sailor’, then you will surely relish the baritone
saxophone glops in the second
Rezitazione. Listeners afraid
of heavy Germanic weather in this piece should be informed that
it is in fact a real find, filled with favourable winds, great
fun, and performed and sung with true refinement and gusto. True
humour can only be delivered straight, and Werner Herbers resists
any temptation to throw in gimmicks, allowing the truly inventive
and strikingly clever score to speak for itself. Schmaltzy salon-orchestra ‘Palm
Court’ moments exist alongside real dances, the insidiously
mild and vibrato-laden chorus of saxophones equal to the strings
in a superb
Tango-Interlude. Cracking syncopated rhythms
infect the
Fox fugato, and there is also some well delivered ‘sprechstimme’ here
and elsewhere. Little references and associations fizz throughout
the piece, and I found myself musing both on Weill’s ‘Alabama
Song’ and Frank Zappa’s ‘Valley Girl’ in
the penultimate
Panama-Song. Performers both vocal and
instrumental, choral and solo, are all brilliant, and the large
Vredenburg venue means we get a spacious and generously proportioned
recording in which to revel in all this new stuff.
The cover illustration for this release is a 1925 lino print, ‘Jazz
Musicians’ by Dutch artist Jef van Jole, and is a perfect
choice for this excellent release. Everything is very fine here,
but the real find is
H.M.S. Royal Oak. There may be MWI
readers who don’t feel inclined to hear how German humourists
took the mickey out of the British in this piece, but I hope
we can take it on the chin. This is a piece which is packed with
surprising and remarkably high quality music, and the last
Finale
e Spirituel is as good as anything by Stravinsky in a comparable
genre. All of the performances are live, but there is no audience
noise or applause, the unequal nature of the different environments
an easily acceptable trade-off for having such a well balanced
programme in a single outstanding artefact.
Dominy Clements