1929: The Wild Sounds of the 20s
Eduard Künneke (1885-1953)
Dance Suite, Concerto grosso for jazz band and large orchestra, Op.26 (1929)
Hanns Eisler (1898-1962)
Tempo der Zeit, Cantata, Op.16 (1929)
Clemens Nicol (narrator), Christopher Dollins (baritone), Ruth Volper (alto), Tomasz Tomaszewski (solo jazz violin)
Madrigalchor der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München
Munich Radio Orchestra/Ernst Theis
rec. 2023, Studio 1, BR, Munich (Künneke), live, March, Prinzregententheater (Eisler)
No texts for the Eisler
BR Klassik 900350 [47]
BR Klassik is investigating the ‘Wild 1920s’ in a series devoted to the usual suspects – Toch, Weill, Krenek, Bartók, and here Eisler and Künneke – whilst simultaneously releasing a series that confusingly covers the same time period, shares the same cover design (other than the booklet colour), and even shares the same year descriptor (‘1923’) but presents very different music. So if you come across that 1923 disc it could either be Caplet’s Le Miroir de Jésus: Mystères du rosaire (review) or the music cited above (review). Look out for ‘Der wilde Sound der 20er’ above the year to be sure.
This one covers the year 1929 in two works. Künneke, a Bruch student and famous for his operettas, was invited by Hans von Benda of Berlin Radio – along with a number of other leading composers – to write a dance suite for broadcast. Fortuitously, Künneke had fairly recently returned from a stay in New York where he had taken full advantage of musical opportunities offered to him and had fallen in love with the potential of the saxophone – though he could quite easily have heard it in Berlin, one of the European centres of hot dance music. Sidney Bechet, after all, was active in the city at just the time that Künneke was writing.
Naturally he thought of using a jazz band but one ‘amplified by strings and some wind instruments’ as he wrote later. However, Benda counter-proposed the use of the radio orchestra that had been formed in 1925, so Künneke instead wrote a suite for two orchestras – the Berlin Funk Orchestra and Dajos Béla’s famous jazz ensemble – in the form of a concerto grosso for jazz band and large orchestra. In reality, Béla was the Russian-born violinist Leon Golzmann. The Tänzerische Suite is a corker of a work. The five movements last just short of half an hour but time flies when one’s listening, so vivid is the playing and so stylish is Ernst Theis’ direction. This isn’t even Theis’ first recording of the suite as he recorded it for cpo well over a decade ago with the orchestra of the Dresden State Opera (review). The cpo disc presents a sequence of these broadcast commissions and whilst I’ve not heard it, so can’t adjudicate between Theis’ two performances, it certainly whets my appetite. My colleague Nick Barnard’s review makes for good reading and he is spot-on about the Künneke.
Künneke’s use of the saxophone section and muted brass playing against the orchestral strings, the insertion of the solo violin and rippling piano, illuminates the opening Foxtrot overture – reminiscent more of Paul Whiteman than jazz per se. The Blues movement is more expansive and reflective of moody music rather than anything definably bluesy but the Intermezzo offers a vivace kick, with crisp strings and winds and percussion kit. A Tango episode brings things to a rhythmic high but in the context of more cosmopolitan strains – nothing Milhaudesque about this as Künneke is always a bit more polite and polished and clearly didn’t go to Harlem in 1925. The languorous Valse Boston of the fourth movement is pensive in places before Künneke brings everything together in his finale, with a Foxtrot and a Boston, a series of sax solos, tenor then alto and propelled by banjo and genial strings. Clearly, he knew his Gershwin as his Rhapsody in Blue build-up is finely maintained, though brief, Künneke maintaining gaiety and tension to the very end.
After the pleasures of this suite we turn to the agit-prop tedium of Hanns Eisler, whose work was intended as a radio cantata. There are no texts which might be just as well, so if your German is not up to it, just grin and bear it. Tempo der Zeit for narrator, soloists, small chorus and ensemble is a hatchet-faced piece. Even its mordent, ironic archaisms grate on me. No matter how much or how often I listened, its tersely mocking use of chorale, high winds versus low brass and other such cliches failed to cohere. Its structure is lopsided and cabaret-styled, as is its narrator’s encouragingly sardonic ‘Bitte sehr, Herr Kapellmeister…’ The longest movement by far is an eight-minute Lied where alto and baritone soloists fuse with a fugato and chorale and chorus in a semblance of significance.
Still, as Meatloaf almost said, one outta two ain’t bad. And the parodic Eisler only lasts 18 minutes. Treat yourself to Theis’ vitalising slice of Weimar life though, to be frank, cpo offers very much more enlightening couplings.
Jonathan Woolf
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