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Saturday, November 26, 2022

Walter Kaufmann - Chamber Works (ARC Ensemble)


Information

Composer: Walter Kaufmann
  • (01) String Quartet No. 11
  • (05) Violin Sonata No. 2, Op. 44
  • (08) String Quartet No. 7
  • (13) Violin Sonatina No. 12 (arr. for Clarinet & Piano)
  • (16) Septet (for Three Violins, Viola, Two Cellos, and Piano)

ARC Ensemble
Erika Raum, violin (1-12, 16)
Marie Bérard, violin (1-4, 8-12, 16)
Steven Dann, viola (1-4, 8-12, 16)
Thomas Wiebe, cello (1-4, 8-12, 16)
Joaquin Valdepeñas, clarinet (13-15)
Kevin Ahfat, piano (5-7, 13-16)
&
Jamie Kruspe, violin (16)
Kimberly Jeong, cello (16)

Date: 2020
Label: Chandos

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Review

Assistant to Bruno Walter, friend of Albert Einstein, author of an ethnomusicological dictionary in common use today: Walter Kaufmann has not been forgotten since his death in 1984 but his music never surfaced as part of Decca’s Entartete Musik collection or other projects dedicated to Jewish émigrés. Thus it has taken the enterprising Toronto-based ARC Ensemble to make the first recording dedicated to his work as the third instalment of a ‘Music in Exile’ series, after volumes dedicated to Paul Ben-Haim (9/13) and Jerzy Fitelberg (11/15).

The sinuous, otherworldly character of the album’s opening music immediately gives notice of Kaufmann’s singular story. Born in Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary) in 1907, Kaufmann abandoned a promising composing/conducting career in 1933 and sailed to Bombay. There he soon became director of European music for All-India Radio (AIR) and wrote all the music played here, before moving to Canada after the war, thence to Indiana, where he became a popular professor of both Beethoven and ‘Oriental Art Music’.

One of Kaufmann’s own teachers had been Franz Schreker, composer of Die ferne Klang, and his quartet-writing has a ‘distant sound’ all its own, coloured by the Indian music that he had been studying even before his move eastwards. The slow movement and Trio of the conventionally structured Eleventh Quartet run up and down open fifths and scales in a spirit of meditative serenity. However, there’s plenty of Bartókian grit in Kaufmann’s oyster: the Allegro barbarico indication of the quartet’s finale speaks for itself. The Seventh Quartet follows the five-movement plan of Bartók’s Fifth, with a spiky, bluesy central Scherzo succeeded by a tremolo-backed Andantino evoking the nocturnal air of Bombay rather than Budapest.

The ARC Ensemble have prepared this unfamiliar repertoire with care and a feeling for its beauties. I enjoyed Erika Raum’s sweet tone in the brief Second Violin Sonata and her quicksilver repartee with pianist Kevin Ahfat in Kaufmann’s sudden turns of thought. He wrote prolifically (including more than two dozen operas), and the ensemble evidently had a job sifting through the output. The modal drift of his harmony can wear thin under prolonged exposure though the individual works show a finely judged sense of when enough and no more has been said. Arranging a Violin Sonatina for clarinet leavens the album’s scoring and underlines a jazzy perfume to its mercurial Intermezzo and moody concluding Canzonetta. Deeper, angrier currents course through the single-movement Septet; and if there is more material of its quality in the Kaufmann archives, Chandos and the ARC Ensemble would do everyone a favour by producing a second volume.

-- Peter Quantrill, Gramophone


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Walter Kaufmann (1 April 1907 – 9 September 1984) was a composer, conductor, ethnomusicologist, librettist and educator. He was born in Karlovy Vary and studied in Berlin (with Franz Schreker and Curt Sachs) and Prague (with Gustav Becking and Paul Nettl). Kaufmann worked as an assistant to Bruno Walter in Berlin before fleeing Nazi Germany to Bombay, India in 1934. After the war he moved to London and Canada before settling as a professor of musicology at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, USA in 1957. Kauffmann was a prolific composer with over eighty works with orchestra in his catalogue.

***

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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