Naxos Pftizner Song Project: Volume Four

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the end of last month Naxos released the fourth volume in its project to record the complete songs composed by Hans Pfitzner. I have previously conjectured that the fifth CD, when it is released, will complete this project. That conjecture has now been reinforced by the fact that the German label cpo has already released such a “complete edition;” and it consists of five CDs. Like the first two CDs in the Naxos project, this new release features a single vocalist, the baritone Uwe Schenker-Primus. As on all of the previous volumes, the pianist is Klaus Simon.

This project has emerged as the largest collection of Pfitzner’s music that I have at my disposal. Where concert experiences are concerned, I am pretty sure that my only contact has been through the preludes that he composed for each of the three acts of his Palestrina opera. Marek Janowski conducted all three of these in Davies Symphony Hall when he was a guest conductor of the San Francisco Symphony in January of 2016. By that time I had already written about a video of the opera for Examiner.com. The only other contact seems to have taken place when I wrote about a two-CD anthology of performances by the conductor Carl Schuricht, which included Pfitzner’s Opus 17 collection of incidental music for the play Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (Katie of Heilbronn, described as a “great historical knightly play”).

As I have previously observed, Pfitzner described himself as an anti-modernist and maintained that description until his death in 1949. Mind you, during my student days I would often have friends that wished their favorite composers (Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven being the usual candidates) would have written more. I never heard anyone say that about the art songs composed by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, or Johannes Brahms. Anyone with that kind of nostalgia will probably welcome the opportunity to listen to the four Pfitzner CDs that Naxos has released thus far.

Nevertheless, having listened to Schenker-Primus on the 21 selections on this new release, I realize that I would be all to happy to listen to him perform at least some of them in recital. As I have previously observed, the vocal recitals I have attended always seem to home in on familiarity, perhaps under the assumption that it is already hard enough to draw an audience without serving up the same-old-same-old favorites. Personally, I can do with a bit more novelty when it comes to listening to vocalists, even if that involves exploring the repertoire of a self-proclaimed “anti-modernist!”