Berthold Goldschmidt - Letze Kapitel; String Quartets

Berthold Goldschmidt (1903-1996)

Letzte Kapitel (1931)

Streichquartett (1936)

Belsatzar (1985)

Streichquartett (1989)

Manderling Quartett

Ars Nova-Ensemble- Peter Schwarz (Conductor)

Alan Marks (Piano)

Much respected by the musical profession in this country as a conductor of experience (in Darmstadt, the Stadtische Oper in Berlin, Glyndebourne Opera at the first Edinburgh Festival, and elsewhere), a Mahler authority (who conducted the UK premieres of the Third Symphony and Deryck Cooke's completion of the Tenth) and an elder statesman of great musical integrity and insight, the 88-year-old Berthold Goldschmidt has not received his due as a composer. Fleeing from Germany in 1935 after writing a successful opera, he settled in London, composed a much-performed Chronica for the Ballets Jooss, won an Arts Council prize in 1951 for his opera Beatrice Cenci (of which, however, only excerpts were broadcast by the BBC until a concert performance was given in 1988), and wrote three large-scale concertos and a clarinet quartet, only to find that by his non-acceptance of dodecaphony and avant-garde techniques he was regarded (ludicrously) as a conservative. Until recently, that is: in the last five or six years there has been some awakening, both in the USA and in Europe, to his true stature; and the present disc throws light on the claim in the authoritative German MGG encyclopedia that Goldschmidt had been ''one of the great hopes of German music prior to 1933''.

From that period, though not performed until 1984, date his settings for narrator, choir, piano and percussion of two satirical poems (whose socio-political overtones were not to become fully manifest until years later) by Erich Kastner: the first, on Nature's revenge on idle and self-indulgent humanity, is couched in a trenchantly bitter jazz style reminiscent of Weill; the second, a longer and hard-hitting dissonant piece, illustrates the decision of a Global Praesidium of the future that the only way to end human conflict is to eliminate human beings. Far more impressive, however, is the powerful Second String Quartet, his first work to be written in exile in 1936. It is a deeply felt (and technically expert) work that reflects his circumstances at the time: a dynamic first movement of nervous tension, a tormented scherzo with a relentlessly 'hunted' atmosphere, an elegiac chaconne (a favourite form of the composer's) and an uneasy dance-like finale.

The other two works here were written half a century later, and are thematically connected. A march theme to Belshazzar's blasphemous words in the unaccompanied choral work (to Heine's poem) reappears in the quartet, symbolizing (according to the composer) an allusion to the infamous Nazi past, but is eventually overlaid with a melody from the Jewish festival of Chanukah. Other thematic ideas in this single-movement work are a theme from a lost orchestral suite of 1929 and two letter ciphers derived from the names of the commissioning state of Schleswig-Holstein and of Goldschmidt's birthplace, Hamburg: the germ-cells S (E flat) CH (B natural) H and HB (B flat) G pervade the quartet (why not HABG, Mr Goldschmidt?); but the work's apparently rhapsodic diversity of mood and tempo masks a subtly controlled formal structure of considerable emotional depth.

The chorus of the Ars Nova ensemble seems efficient but is tonally not very pleasing: the Mandelring Quartet, on the other hand is an efficiently integrated and highly accomplished team whose commitment is evident and whose performances are thoroughly gripping. Mention should also be made of the extremely informative insert-note.' Gramophone Magazine