Louis Glass (1864-1936)
Piano Works Volume 2
Piano Sonata No 1 in E minor, Op 6 (c.1890)
Skitser, Op 21 (c.1890s)
Landlige Billeder, Op 48 (pub.1915)
Sommerminder (Lyse Nætter), Op 53 No 2
Mazurka, Op 53 No 3
Aquareller, Op 58 (pub.1922)
Vort Bal (c.1896)
Jakob Alsgaard Bahr (piano)
rec. 2023, Festsalen, Hjørring Gymnasium, Denmark
Danacord DACOCD981 [76]
Louis Glass’s father Christian Henrik was a composer, pianist and organist as well as a music educator who founded his own conservatory when Louis was fifteen years old. He evidently intended a musical career for Louis and just as evidently this was what Louis wanted too. Not surprisingly his formative education came from his father and his progress allowed him to play the Schumann Concerto at the Tivoli Concert Hall as well as performing as a cellist in an earlier concert. He took some instruction in Brussels but found it inadequate and returned to Denmark where he took lessons from Niels Gade and Franz Neruda. He composed up until his death in 1936 with six symphonies and several chamber works to his name but as a firm opponent of modern music in the early twentieth century he was perhaps always destined to become a forgotten figure. Danacord have addressed this with recordings of all the symphonies and CPO have three under their belt while volume one of the piano music appeared on DACOCD956.
His first piano work dates from 1888 and his first piano sonata appeared two years after that. A contemporary review describes it as a truly magnificent work, arguably among the most significant ones written in recent years, a statement that may have been true if only because no major composer wrote a piano sonata at around this time; the closest is Tchaikowsky’s G major Sonata written a decade earlier. That said this is an undeniably attractive work. The chordal fanfare that announces the opening movement suggests a more dramatic piece than we actually get, a very romantically written extended song without words with plenty of well conceived piano writing but not lots of memorable melodic interest. The very pleasant adagio has a gentle Schubertian opening theme, delicately decorated as the movement continues with outbursts that briefly interrupt the tranquillity, martial chords that suggest the first movement’s opening motif. Schubert was also the first name that came to mind with the jaunty scherzo and the dotted rhythms of the trio do nothing to dispel this feeling. The finale returns to the mood of the first movement, lyrical and full of rippling piano figuration. It is only toward the end that it grows more passionate and the music begins to find a dramatic edge that has hovered around the rest of the sonata without really showing itself.
After this large scale work Jakob Alsgaard Bahr fills the rest of the disc with shorter works, some stand alone but mostly in collections, all in a mid-nineteenth century romantic idiom. His Skitser, sketches, were published a few years after the first sonata. These range from the simple lyricism of the first to more energetic numbers like the hunting song, no.3 or the quick march of no.5. There is a huge contrast between the sixth, a lilting children’s song and the tragic, elegiac seventh while dance is evident in the gentle jig of the eighth and slow waltz that brings the set to a close. All are engaging works and while we are unlikely to hear them on the concert platform they would be perfect for the amateur market as perhaps Glass intended. Aquareller, water colours, opens with the water mill in which the constant motion of the the mill accompanies a rather dark and sombre melody. The Balladeer is more about piano texture and figuration than the vocal line that one would expect from the title; it is more suggestive of a storyteller recounting a particularly vivacious tale. Two consecutive pieces portray the shepherdess and the chimney sweep from Hans Christian Andersen’s whimsical tale of the romance between two china figures; the shepherdess dances an elegant waltz and in the second the chimney sweep offers reassurance amidst the Shepherdess’s exuberant excitement about their running away together into the wide world beyond the little table that has always been their home. The final piece is a procession that has a vaguely Christmas feeling to its slowly winding march.
His Rural images were published in 1915 and open with at the blacksmith’s which offers a slightly more discordant harmony than we have come to expect but Glass is merely emulating the striking of hammer on anvil and the heavy work of the smithy in this mildly percussive piece. This was no new direction for Glass as the rest of the set shows; in grandfather’s garden all grace and delicacy, ducks on the way to the pond, a comical procession that imitates their waddling gait and in the cowshed in which a sustained ostinato is accompanied by short runs, perhaps the cattle lowing? Without the title as a guide one might consider that the piece evoked some dark, clandestine forces at work. A sense of caution pervades the slightly eerie through the dark forest with its rising chromatics and changes of piano texture but all is forgotten in the busy, bustling in the chicken yard, presumably at lunchtime and, by the sound of it, involving a lot of chickens.
Three single pieces complete the disc though two bear the catalogue numbers op.53 Nos.2 and 3. No.3 is his mazurka and for me it is more of an energetic minuet but that doesn’t detract from a dance that has some wonderful juxtapositions of harmony. Apparently it also gained a wider audience when played by the 7th Regiment’s Music Corps in 1922. It was published alongside his Summer memories, a lilting salon waltz that he also included in his 1927 orchestral suite pages from the year’s picture book. Claus Røllum-Larsen’s comment about the final piece, named for the event whose programme it was printed on, Vort Bal, the Grand Ball of the Journalists’ Association in Copenhagen, that it is a completely unknown piece by Louis Glass probably means more in Denmark where his music is undoubtedly better known. It lasts for a little less than 40 seconds but is a delightful tripping song without words.
Several of the pieces here could happily sit alongside Grieg’s Lyric Pieces in a recital, especially the items from his Rural images and on the strength of this recital it appears that as far as his piano music is concerned he is one of those talented composers like Adolf Jensen or Jean Louis Nicodé who trod no new paths but were gifted within their field. Jakob Alsgaard Bahr presents them in the best light whilst sound and presentation are first class.
Rob Challinor
Previous review: John France (June 2024)
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