Reminiscences
Karel Berman (1919-1995)
1938-1945 Reminiscences (1957)
Ervin Schulhoff (1894-1942)
Hot-Sonata (1930)
Ellwood Derr (1932-2008)
I Never Saw Another Butterfly
Hannah Creviston (piano)
Christopher Creviston (alto saxophone)
Amanda DeMaris (soprano)
rec. 2024, Blue Griffin’s Studio, The Ballroom, Lansing, USA
No texts
Blue Griffin BGR683 [51]

The premise of this disc is loosely Entartete Musik. Karel Berman survived Terezín, Auschwitz and then Kaufering, a sub-camp of Dachau and Ervin Schulhoff died in the labour camp of Wülzburg. Meanwhile the American composer, Ellwood Derr, offers a composition based on the collection of children’s poems found in Terezín after the War called I Never Saw Another Butterfly.

Berman’s 1938-1945 Reminiscences was originally a three-movement Suite for Piano, composed in the Czech holding camp during his incarceration there. Later, the three movements were expanded to eight in 1957 when the work was retitled, and this is the form in which it’s now performed.  Paul Orgel recorded it in an all-piano recital containing works by Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein and Victor Ullmann on Phoenix PHCD161 and Russell Ryan played it in a mixed vocal-piano recital – Haas, Krása, Klein, Ullmann, Schul, Ilse Weber – with baritone Wolfgang Holzmair on Bridge 9280.

I’ll reprise what I wrote about the cycle in my Phoenix review. The cycle is ‘a block of pianistic autobiography and traces Berman’s life from the joyous and carefree Mládi (Youth) through the warmth and domestic reflection as well as romantic burgeoning of the Family Home. Explicitly descriptive the ominous, grotesque goose steps of the 1939 Occupation herald a dramatic change of tone; the mordant touches of Prokofiev add a sour taste, as do the mechanistic slowings down of the Factory scene. Auschwitz is evoked with spare and granitic remorselessness in three or so minutes – Hannah Creviston is notably slower than Orgel in this movement. Berman calls upon impressionism for the penultimate Alone-Alone tableau, its tied bass note and chords nagging away like a colossal migraine before the final New Life brings reminiscences of earlier days and renewed vigour and hope. This is only one of two extant compositions by Berman and it evokes pain and melancholy – and brutish barbarism – with measured control.’

Schulhoff’s Hot-Sonata dates from the days of Weimar Germany and has received numerous recordings over the last two decades. It’s performed here by the husband-and-wife pairing of Christopher and Hannah Creviston. I rather like this reading. The syncopation generates a vital sense of rhythmic direction and Christopher Creviston really digs into the blue notes in the second movement, ramping up his articulation even more in the blues-drenched third movement.

There have been a number of settings of I Never Saw Another Butterfly. Among the best-known are Charles Davidson’s choral song cycle, and Srul Irving Glick’s, which was once sung by Maureen Forrester. Lori Laitman’s much more recent setting has also become deservedly well-known. Derr’s setting of five of the songs isn’t dated in the notes. Derr taught at the University of Michigan for decades, retiring in 2007 only to die the following year. The setting is for voice, piano and saxophone calls for soprano Amanda DeMaris to draw upon the harsher element of her tone as well as to employ part-parlando. The expressionist element of the vocal line is not wholly inappropriate, and the urgent saxophone line adds to the terse, brittle aspect of Derr’s settings. They leave a powerful sense of starkness in their wake. There are no texts so you may well want to find them online.

I found the recording itself rather flat and lacking in cushioning warmth. Decisions about this disc will revolve, inevitably, around couplings and whether this 51-minute disc offers enough width of repertoire. It certainly plays to the performers’ very real strengths.

Jonathan Woolf