Szymon Laks - Chamber Works (ARC Ensemble)

Information

Composer: Szymon Laks

• (01) String Quartet No. 4
• (04) Divertimento
• (07) Piano Sonatina
• (11) Concertino
• (14) Passacaille
• (15) Piano Quintet

ARC Ensemble

Joaquin Valdepeñas, clarinet (4-6, 11-14)

Erika Raum, violin (1-3, 15-18)

Marie Bérard, violin (1-6, 15-18)

Steven Dann, viola (1-3, 15-18)

Winona Zelenka, cello (1-3, 15-18)

David Louie, piano (4-10)

Dianne Werner, piano (14-18)

with

Sarah Jeffrey, oboe (11-13)

Frank Morelli, bassoon (4-6, 11-13)

Date: 2017

Label: Chandos

https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%2010983

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Review

Volume 3 of the ARC Ensemble’s Music in Exile series profiles Szymon Laks, who moved to Paris from Warsaw in the 1920s but was sent in 1942 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he immersed himself in musical activities and was spared death and hard labour as a result.

The experience must have been horrific even so. But it’s hard to say with any certainty how it infiltrated Laks’s music. He was always a pragmatic composer; his background working in cafés and on ships meant his writing in Auschwitz could draw on the ‘odeon’ technique of orchestrating for any permutation of instruments. The pre-war Sonatina for piano (1927) is the most interesting work here; four movements journeying from an austere Moderato built on stringent neoclassical counterpoint to a big-boned Allegro with shades of Debussy’s modality.

Laks’s String Quartet No 4 (1962) reveals his geographical loyalties most clearly, with Slavic melodies cast in light, elegant French style and played with an attractive sepia tone. Sometimes the harmonies close in on themselves, edging towards the pain of the post-traumatic stress Laks clearly experienced. His Passacaille (1945) speaks most clearly of that.

There is similar focus and technique at play in the Concertino (1965) for three winds, but it can sound like a study. I hear rather more than the ‘cheerful divertissement’ that the booklet note describes in Laks’s Piano Quintet (1967), an arrangement of the String Quartet No 3 from the pivotal year of 1945. There is argument in the opening Allegro, something chilling in the ghostly Lento, sure signs of the composer’s rhythmic (popular) modernity in the Vivace and even a fugue in the finale. ARC play the piece with an ear for both the shifting moods and the technical rigour. But it’s hard to get away from the idea that while Laks’s plenteous abilities made him an indispensable 20th-century musical functionary in the moment, in the long term he might not have had an awful lot to say.

-- Andrew Mellor, Gramophone

More reviews:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2017/Aug/Laks_chamber_CHAN10983.htm

https://www.classical-music.com/reviews/chamber/two-performances-lakss-string-quartets-performed-arc-ensemble-and-messages-quartet/

https://artmusiclounge.wordpress.com/2017/06/20/laks-startling-chamber-works-revived/

https://limelightmagazine.com.au/reviews/szymon-laks-chamber-works-arc-ensemble/

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jun/15/szymon-laks-chamber-works-review-arc-ensemble-chandos

https://www.wtju.net/szymon-laks-chamber-works-music-survivor/

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Szymon Laks (1 November 1901 – 11 December 1983) was a Polish Jewish composer and violinist. He studied at the Conservatoire of Warsaw and the Conservatoire National in Paris. Laks was arrested by the German authorities in 1941 and deported to Auschwitz in July 1942. He became head of the prisoners' orchestra there and survived for more than two years. Laks worked in the baroque and classical genres, the traditional principles and formal construction of instruments combining for tonal harmony. From 1972, he dedicated his writing to translation, and is the author of a number of books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Laks

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The ARC (Artists of the Royal Conservatory) Ensemble is a group group led by Simon Wynberg and made up of faculty members of the Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music. The ensemble was founded in 2002 to showcase the considerable pool of talent resident at the Glenn Gould School. They are singularly devoted to reviving unjustly neglected repertoire: music of marginalized historical figures of music such as Mieczyslaw Weinberg, Julius Röntgen, Philipp Jarnach, and Alexandre Tansman; and the lesser-known legacies of well-known composers such as Richard Strauss and Johannes Brahms.
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/arc-ensemble-mn0001701400
http://www.arcensemble.com/

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