Reynaldo Hahn: Piano Quintet, Songs, Piano Quartet (Chandos)
Hans Gál: Music for Orchestra (CPO)
★★★☆☆/★★★☆☆
If you’re about to step right into a heat tub, put one among these on the participant and submerse your January physique in a fantasy world that by no means adjustments.
What Hahn and Gál have in widespread, apart from a one-syllable identify, is a reluctance ever to be tempted past the musical language they had been born into youth.
Hahn, Venezuelan-born lover of Marcel Proust, composes remembrances of these misplaced instances earlier than the First World Battle. The string quartet and piano quintet on this album, every composed straight after a world warfare, would possibly simply be mistaken for Fauré or Saint Saens, masquerading as Vinteuil in Proust’s monumental novel. Beautiful melodies flutter and flicker. The pleasure is instantaneous and chic, and simply as swiftly forgotten.
Hahn’s songs are even lovelier, conjuring an age of leisure, of two-hour lunches and love within the afternoon. The completed performers are members of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective; the tenor is Karim Sulayman. What’s to not like?
Hans Gál, an Austrian refugee, settled in Edinburgh and lived to the age of 97. Gal’s sound world is that of Dvorak and Brahms. A 1936 Serenade for String Orchestra offers no trace of present anxieties, wandering by way of the Vienna Woods and not using a care on the earth. A 1939 concertino for violin and string orchestra is showy and gradual, a salon piece for Sunday afternoons.
20 years later, in Music for String Orchestra of 1957, Gál’s language has moved no additional ahead. If the disc hadn’t carried his identify, I may need mistaken this piece for one thing by Serenanden-Fuchs, the Viennese professor who took espresso with Brahms and taught the teenaged Gustav Mahler.
It’s all splendidly written, completely made, utterly out of time. The Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, conductor Jan Söderblom, play this music with dreamy relish. There isn’t any legislation (but) in opposition to pleasure.
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Norman Lebrecht is without doubt one of the most widely-read commentators on music, tradition and cultural politics. He’s a daily presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Avenue Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and different publications. His weblog, Slipped Disc, is among the many most generally learn cultural websites on-line, breaking unique tales and campaigning in opposition to human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.
