courtesy of Naxos of America
This Friday Naxos will release a new album entitled Exiles in Paradise: Émigré Composers in Hollywood. This is a topic that has interested me for some time, not only from the biographical perspective of who those composers were but also in the emergence of opportunities to experience adventurous music in the greater Los Angeles area. My most recent effort in writing about the first of these two topics took place in August of 2018, when I reviewed the book The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and their Contemporaries, 1930–1951, edited by E. Randol Schoenberg (the composer’s grandson) for a publication by the University of California Press. After reading that book, I realized that it was time to take Evenings On and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angles, 1939–1971, written by Dorothy Lamb Crawford, off of my things-to-read pile for a broader account of “an adventurously creative music scene in Los Angeles,” as I put it when writing about this book a couple of months later. As is so often the case, Amazon.com is currently accepting pre-orders for Exiles in Paradise.
The recording itself is basically a recital album by cellist Brinton Averil Smith. Music by nine “exile composers” is presented on the album, with “the last word” provided by Jascha Heifetz’ arrangement of music by George Gershwin. Smith is accompanied at the piano by Evelyn Chen for all but two solo selections. The solo works are composed by Ernst Toch (his Opus 90c set of three impromptus composed for Gregor Piatigorsky) and Miklós Rózsa, whose Opus 36 “Toccata capricciosa” was dedicated to the memory of Piatigorsky.
The only piece explicitly composed for cello and piano is Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Opus 47, “I Nottambuli. Variazioni Fantastiche” (night owls, fantastic variations). For two of the selections Smith plays music that was originally written for violin. The first of these is the first of the two pieces in Joseph Achron’s Opus 32 Stimmungen (moods); and the second is from Louis Gruenberg’s Opus 26, the last of three pieces collected under the title Jazzettes. Most interesting, however, is that Smith plays the vocal line in “Saget mir, auf welchem Pfade” (tell me on which path), the fifth song in Schoenberg’s Opus 15 The Book of the Hanging Gardens song cycle.
The remaining selections are arrangements. Two of them are by Smith himself. One is a world premiere recording, an arrangement of the last (“Serenade”) of the five solo piano pieces that Sergei Rachmaninoff collected in his Opus 3 Morceaux de fantaisie (fantasy pieces). The other is a suite of four selections from Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Opus 11 collection of incidental music for William Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing. There are two Heifetz arrangements, the aforementioned Gershwin selection (“It Ain’t Necessarily So” from Porgy and Bess), and “Alt Wien” (old Vienna), the eleventh of the 30 solo piano pieces collected in Leopold Godowsky’s Triakontameron (a title inspired by The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio). Igor Stravinsky collaborated with violinist Samuel Dushkin to prepare an arrangement of the “Berceuse” (lullaby) music from his score for the ballet “The Firebird.” Finally, David Grigorian prepared the arrangement of Franz Waxman’s highly challenging “Carmen Fantasie,” which he composed for Heifetz.
Smith has provided an informative set of notes for the accompanying booklet. In addition to giving the birth and death dates of all the composers, he also documents which years they spent in Los Angeles. It is important to note that this cast of characters goes beyond the “Weimar on the Pacific” scope of the Schoenberg book. Indeed, if anything, Schoenberg himself is the outlier among those composers fleeing from both the Third Reich and World War II. Furthermore, Godowsky came to Los Angeles to get away from the First World War. He only remained in Los Angeles until 1919 and died in 1938.
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