Ernest Kanitz (1894-1978)
Chamber Works
Violin Sonata, Op.10 (1921)
String Quartet in D major (1945)
Sonata for Solo Cello (1955)
Concertino (1956-57)
Sonata Californiana, for E flat Alto Saxophone and Piano (1948)
ARC Ensemble
Wallace Halladay (saxophone), Anna Štube (violin), Joel Quarrington (double bass)
rec. 2025, Koerner Hall, TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning, Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto
Chandos CHAN20374 [73]
Ernest (Ernst) Kanitz was born in Vienna into a well-off family and studied first with Richard Heuberger and then with Franz Schreker. His orchestral music was performed by the great and the good – the young George Szell, Clemens Krauss and Carl Schuricht among them – and he directed a well-known women’s chorus in the city. Forced to leave Vienna in 1938 he found his way to America, first to South Carolina and then to Los Angeles, where he achieved academic distinction as the Professor Emeritus of the Music Department of the University of Southern California.
The works in this latest volume of the ARC Ensemble’s ‘Music in Exile’ series include one from his Viennese days, the Violin Sonata of 1921. This opens deceptively, with dappled impressionist figures redolent of a compound of Debussy and Szymanowski, and then motors off into sturdier, late-Romantic writing. There’s refined lyricism in the slow movement that generates a flightier faster panel and offers some of the most convincing writing in the sonata. The skittish finale includes a fugal section and ends brightly. The String Quartet was dedicated to Ernst Toch and composed in 1945. It’s a rather playful, placid, nostalgic work opening with rocking figures and an unthreatening gentleness. Kanitz gives his players plenty of space in the Rondino second movement and then unleashes a Kreisleresque ‘Old Viennese Tune and Variations’ with a decidedly Alt Wien theme and slower or faster variations, swaying through perfumed communicative panels of sheer escapism. The fast finale, both droll and elfin, is attractively communicative, the whole quartet avoiding any sense of combative tension.
The solo Cello Sonata of 1955 is a terser and more austere affair. It’s only ten-minutes long but is angular, withdrawn – not sullen, exactly, more melancholic than that – but unleashes a fast, freewheeling virtuoso finale to compensate. Kanitz began the Concertino for five players (violin, viola, clarinet, double-bass and piano) the following year and it conforms to the austerity of his writing during this time, though he can’t keep his natural sense of lyricism escaping as the work develops. In fact, the work’s tranquillity and romantic burgeoning are equally attractive and the finale – which begins with a dreaded fugue – turns out to be exciting and vivid.
The final work is the Sonata Californiana, for E flat Alto Saxophone and Piano, written in 1948. It opens in languid West Coast style with an immediate, airy melodic appeal, dispenses a slow movement of reserved lament – quite tender – and goes ‘Hollywood’ – as the movement heading tells us – in the finale. This allows Kanitz all sorts of opportunities for vivacious Americana with Blues and theatre stylings and ending the disc on a real high.
This is another attractive entrant in the series not least for the fact that, as so often in the series, these are all premiere recordings. All the performers prove adept, sensitive and stylish exponents. If I named one, I’d have to name-check them all. With a fine recording and equally good booklet notes, this is another welcome reclamation.
Jonathan Woolf
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