Alexander Zemlinsky - Piano Music (Silke Avenhaus)

Information

Composer: Alexander Zemlinsky

• (01-11) Ländliche Tänze, Op. 1
• (12) Albumblatt
• (13-16) Fantasien über Gedichte von Richard Dehmel, Op. 9
• (17-20) Vier Balladen
• (21) Menuett (from Das gläserne Herz)
• (22) Skizze
• (23) Ein Lichtstrahl

Silke Avenhaus, piano
Date: 2003
Label: Naxos
http://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.557331

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Review

I suspect that much of Zemlinsky’s piano music will be unfamiliar even to the more assiduous cultivators of the fin de siècle Viennese muse. It’s hard to think that anyone hearing his Op.1 Ländliche Tänze would possibly guess its composer from the enjoyable, through impossibly derivative, hints of mid-century worthies of the pantheon. This was his first piece accorded an opus number and dates from 1891. The results are certainly pianistic but the obvious echoes of Chopin in the second and of Schumann in the third show Zemlinsky trying on cloaks rather than cutting some of his own cloth. The salon certainly called in these early works, though there’s lyric ease in the fifth dance, a big, bold Brahmsian nudge in the sixth and some attractive metrical games in the tenth.

That he could spin an affecting melodic line should come as no surprise of course. He does it with the simplest of means in the Schumannesquely entitled Albumblatt but one should really turn to a much more engaging work, his Op.9 Fantasien über Gedichte von Richard Dehmel for evidence of bigger, more prescient things. This is a four-movement work enshrining Dehmel’s poems - and they’re little poetic gems. The second alternates the gravity of a simple chordal chorale with more lyrically engaging material. The last of the four has a brisk lightness after the headier intensity of the third. I appreciate it might have necessitated another booklet page but Zemlinsky’s writing certainly intrigued me enough to want to read Dehmel’s poems. Dating from 1892-3 the Ballads are appropriately tensile and apt to burst into Romantic life with a flourish. Certainly there’s a strong Brahmsian lineage but there’s enough Zemlinsky to keep the attention firmly focused as well.

Ein Lichtstrahl was a mime drama with piano accompaniment for which Zemlinsky wrote the music in 1901 though there was in the end no performance. The piece itself lay unperformed for many years, for most of the century in fact, and whilst it’s no masterpiece it’s a well-crafted, rather roguish and melodramatic piece of romantic writing – variational, light, somewhat derivative but seemingly well suited to its original function.

Silke Avenhaus never does too much with these pieces, never tries to over-inflate the rhetoric, instead allowing them to find their own level. She seems to have enjoyed the more roguish elements of Ein Lichtstrahl but her playing of the Fantasien is especially noteworthy – and fortunately she’s been accorded a good acoustic in which to display her sensitive musicianship.

-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

More reviews:
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/jun/24/classicalmusicandopera.shopping2
http://www.allmusic.com/album/zemlinsky-piano-music-mw0001417707
http://www.amazon.com/Piano-Music-A-Zemlinsky/dp/B0009JMEJW
http://www.naxos.com/reviews/reviewslist.asp?catalogueid=8.557331&languageid=EN

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Alexander Zemlinsky (October 14, 1871, Vienna – March 15, 1942, Larchmont, New York) was an Austrian composer, conductor, and teacher. Zemlinsky's best-known work is the Lyric Symphony, which Zemlinsky compared in a letter to his publisher to Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. As a conductor, Zemlinsky was admired by, among others, Kurt Weill and Stravinsky. As a teacher, his pupils included Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Hans Krása and Karl Weigl.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_von_Zemlinsky

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Silke Avenhaus is a German pianist. She studied with Bianca Bodalia and Klaus Schilde (University of Music and Performing Arts Munich), György Sebök (Indiana University, Bloomington) and with Sandor Végh and Andras Schiff.

http://www.silke-avenhaus.de/bio_index.html

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