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 in every of these on the participant and submerse your January physique in a fantasy world that by no means modifications.
What Hahn and Gál have in widespread, aside from a one-syllable identify, is a reluctance ever to be tempted past the musical language they have been born into youth.
Hahn, Venezuelan-born lover of Marcel Proust, composes remembrances of these misplaced occasions earlier than the First World Conflict. The string quartet and piano quintet on this album, every composed straight after a world conflict, would possibly simply be mistaken for Fauré or Saint Saens, masquerading as Vinteuil in Proust’s monumental novel. Pretty melodies flutter and flicker. The pleasure is prompt 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 achieved 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 provides no trace of present anxieties, wandering by way of the Vienna Woods with out 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 might 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, fully out of time. The Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, conductor Jan Söderblom, play this music with dreamy relish. There is no such thing as a regulation (but) towards 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 Road 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 towards human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.
