Walter Kaufmann (1907-1984)
Madras Express (1947)
Dirge (1946)
Indian Facades (1946)
Symphony No.2 (1935)
Regensburg Philharmonic Orchestra/Stefan Veselka
rec. 2024, Neuhaussaal Regensburg, Germany
MDG 90123636 SACD [50]

The reclamation of Walter Kaufmann’s music, on disc if not in the concert hall, continues with this MDG release of a selection of his orchestral music. It follows cpo’s exploratory CD containing  the Piano Concerto No 3, Symphony No 3, An Indian Symphony and Six Indian Miniatures and Chandos’ disc of a selection of his chamber music. For more biographical details of the Czech-born composer who spent a number of years in India, I’ll refer you to those two reviews.

As with both the cited releases, MDG contains a programme that includes a work written in India as well as those that followed shortly after he left, first for London and then for North America. Here it’s Symphony No.2, written soon after he arrived in India in 1935 that bears the impressions of his exposure to Indian music, notably ragas. It’s a taut, three-movement work clocking in at just 15 minutes, opening with freely rhapsodic but shapely music that hints at new harmonic possibilities in its use of Indian elements The central movement opens with dark-hewn basses but lightens to include cinematic warmth, albeit also a processional of some unease. The finale is crisp, neo-classical, playful and rhythmic and it shares many of the same preoccupation with the Third Symphony, composed the following year.

Madras Express is an exciting, crunchy, rugged, filmic and rather sub-Honegger train study written in 1947, probably in Halifax, Canada. Dirge was written the previous year and it occupied him on his journey from Bombay (Mumbai as it is now) to London. It marked the end of twelve years of exile for Kaufmann though his stay in Europe was to prove brief. Lasting ten minutes Dirge embraces various episodes, varying in speed and intensity, but gradually a powerfully threnodic element infiltrates the music, leading to a percussion-led explosion, baleful and ultimately unresolved. In its intensity and use of an eleventh century antiphon, it feels a more personal and perhaps ultimately revealing work than either Madras Express or the Symphony.

Indian Facades – a Solemn Rhapsody for Orchestra also dates from 1946 and its form – there are seven ‘facades’ – offers plenty of scope for variety, colour, rhythms and use of raga material. It also gives the opportunity for Kaufmann to explore lyricism and expressive detailing cast in a late-Romantic profile. For example, he uses drone basses, and he is inevitably fine at fluid wind lines over the drone. The variation form which he uses gives him time to expand slower sections which generate a hypnotic effect. This 20-minute work is the best of Kaufmann here. It’s imaginative, quietly ‘solemn’ as promised but also generally laced with warmth. If you’re coming to the composer afresh with this disc, I’d start with this work.

The notes and recording quality are both fine and Stefan Veselka and the Regensburg Philharmonic Orchestra have Kaufmann’s measure.

Jonathan Woolf  

Other review: David Barker (October 2025)

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