Jeffrey Khaner GERMAN FLUTE MUSIC GIESEKING • GENZMER • HENZE HINDEMITH • KARG-ELERT CHARLES ABRAMOVIC, PIANO 1 Although nowadays chiefly remembered as a fine pianist and particularly for his recordings of the music of Debussy and Ravel, Walter Gieseking had many other accomplishments Jeffrey Khaner and interests. In the words of his daughter, Jutta Hajmassy: ‘He was the most loving GERMAN FLUTE MUSIC father and grandfather, who spoiled his grandchildren, worked his garden without concern for his pianist’s hands and carefully and painstakingly prepared the many butterflies CHARLES ABRAMOVIC, PIANO captured during his tours. Otherwise he read a great deal, mostly books on natural science, and there was no insect or plant which he did not know. He played the piano at Walter Gieseking (1895 - 1956) Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926) home infrequently and only for his pleasure.’ Gieseking, who was also a respected teacher Sonatine for flute and piano 13:30 Sonatina for flute and piano 9:19 and a talented composer, was once asked how he managed to find time for all of these 1. I Moderato 4:57 7. I Moderato - activities. ‘Oh that’s quite simple!’, he said. ‘I never practise. I study only new pieces, 2. II Allegretto 3:27 Allegro molto vivace 2:45 which I generally learn on train journeys. On concert tours it’s much more important to get 3. III Vivace 5:01 8. II Andantino 3:02 enough sleep and to keep in shape by getting some outdoor exercise’. 9. III Presto 3:26 Harald Genzmer (1909 – 2007) Walter Wilhelm Gieseking was born on 5 November 1895 (just eleven days before the birth Sonata No. 2 for flute and piano Paul Hindemith (1895 – 1963) of Paul Hindemith) in Lyons as his father, a distinguished German doctor and entomologist, in E minor 14:00 Sonata for flute and piano 13:59 was living in France at that time. Not surprisingly perhaps, Gieseking himself later became 4. I Allegro moderato 4:32 10. I Heiter bewegt 4:43 very interested in entomology and, over the years, built up a collection of some fourteen 5. II Scherzo 4:08 11. II Sehr langsam 4:22 thousand specimens of moths and butterflies which was one of the most extensive in 6. III Introduktion und Finale: 12. III Sehr lebhaft. Marsch 4:48 private ownership. (It now forms part of the Natural History Collection in Wiesbaden.) Langsam - lebhaft 5:14 So determined was he not to miss the opportunity of adding to this collection that he Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877 – 1933) once left the piano during an outdoor recital in order to pursue and capture a particularly 13. Sinfonische Kanzone Op.114 8:40 interesting moth that had just flown by. As a child Gieseking travelled a great deal with his parents, easily picking up various Recorded at the Curtis Hall, Philadelphia, USA, Art Direction and Design: Alan Trugman languages the while. He was privately educated and began to play the piano at the age of 22 November 1999 Photography: Jack Van Antwerp Recording Producer and Engineer: Da-Hong four. By the time he was five he could both read and write and, as he once claimed, ‘after Seetoo This CD was recorded using 24-Bit, Direct-to- that, I never needed to learn anything’, explaining that he was, ‘from a tiny little chap, Hard-Disc Technology. very fond of music’ and that he had somehow picked up piano playing by himself. Translations: German – Eckhardt van den Hoogen French – Marie-Stella Pâris It was not until he was about sixteen years old that he began his formal musical training when he went to study with Karl Leimer at the Municipal Conservatory in his mother’s 2 3 home city of Hanover. (In 1930, he was to write a book with Leimer which, when published sent to become pianist and accompanist at the Lazarettenkonzerte, concerts put on in in English, was given the title The Shortest Way to Pianistic Perfection.) By the age military hospitals for the benefit of recuperating wounded officers. of twenty he had made his first public appearance in Hanover where he subsequently performed a cycle of Beethoven sonatas in a series of six recitals. Soon after that he was Genzmer was born in the town of Blumenthal, near Bremen, on 9 February 1909. He began conscripted into the German army as a regimental bandsman and thus spent the rest of his formal musical education in 1925 by studying theory with the German musicologist, the First World War as an orchestral timpanist and jazz pianist. conductor and composer, Hermann Stephani (1877-1960), one of whose enthusiasms was for having orchestral scores notated entirely in the treble clef. Three years later, Genzmer After the War he embarked on a career as accompanist, chamber music player and opera enrolled at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik where he studied the piano with Rudolph coach. He made his debut in Berlin in 1920, playing music by Ravel, and three years later Schmidt, the clarinet with Alfred Richter and composition with Paul Hindemith. It was in gave his first recital in London. At his American debut in 1926 he played a concerto by 1927, the year before Genzmer arrived at the school, that Hindemith had taken up his Hindemith, a composer whose music had already featured in his recitals. On 10 April that post there. Prior to this he had had practically no teaching experience but, by insisting year, the Italian composer Alfredo Casella, whose Partita for piano and orchestra and on having no more than ten postgraduate students in his classes, he soon became a very Sonatina, Op.28, were often played by Gieseking, described him in the Christian Science good teacher. He had very strong views on the role of the composer at that time and was Monitor as ‘one of the most rounded, most interesting figures to appear in the musical concerned that many young ones were using the current freedom of expression in music to world in recent years.’ mask an incompetence which the audiences of the day were unable to recognize. He saw it as his role first to teach his pupils the tools of the musical trade and then to encourage It was in the middle of the following decade, between August and December 1935, that them to consider who would be performing the works that they composed and who Gieseking composed his delightful three-movement Sonatine for flute and piano. Gieseking listening. This was a lesson that Genzmer learnt well as is illustrated in the many works he had always loved the flute—it was an instrument his father played occasionally—and, composed for amateurs and students. indeed, he studied it himself for a while. Before long he was performing the Sonatine in Wiesbaden and elsewhere with the flautist Franz Danneberg and later recorded it in Berlin In 1932 Genzmer won the Mendelssohn Prize and two years later, on completion of with Gustav Scheck who had recently been appointed Professor of Flute at that city’s his studies, he went to work at Breslau Opera as a chorus repetiteur. By 1938 he was Hochschule für Musik. Another work for flute and piano that Gieseking composed about teaching theory and ensemble playing at the Volksmusikschule in Berlin-Neukölln and from this time was his Variations on a theme by Edvard Grieg. Gieseking died suddenly in London 1946 until 1957 was professor of composition at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg. From on 26 October 1956, at the age of only sixty, while engaged in recording the complete there he moved to Munich where he taught for several years at that city’s Hochschule für cycle of Beethoven sonatas. Musik. It was also in Munich that he died on 16 December 2007. Like Walter Gieseking, Harald Genzmer spent some time as a wartime military bandsmen, In the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Genzmer has been described by in his case as a clarinettist during the Second World War. Later in that War, Genzmer was Karl H. Wörner ‘a complete craftsman’ and as ‘the leading figure among those German composers who have continued in the direction of Hindemith’. Indeed, like his teacher, Genzmer was a very prolific composer who wrote music for all kinds of instruments. 4 5 Included in the catalogue of his works are sonatas for piano, violin, viola, cello, double in which these pieces were written and that only two of them had been published—‘a bass, guitar, clarinet and flute. His first sonata for flute dates from about 1939 while Fortner-like sonatina for flute and piano and a violin sonata’—he explained that ‘inevitably, the second, the one in E minor recorded here, was composed in 1945. More recently, the imaginative world of the six amateur sonatas of 1945 [the Hindemithian ones referred he produced a sonata for flute and harp (1990) and a fantasie-sonata for flute and guitar to above] was re-explored here, but this time on a quasi-professional basis.’ Henze (1999). dedicated his ‘Fortner-like’ sonatina to the then flautist Kurt Redel who was later to become a respected conductor and founder of the Munich Pro Arte Orchestra. It was in 1946, the year after Genzmer had produced the second of his flute sonatas, that the twenty-year-old Hans Werner Henze composed his Sonatina for flute and piano. A few At about the same time that Henze was composing his Sonatina for flute,Paul Hindemith weeks earlier—on 27 September 1946—the first performance of his Op.1, a Chamber was becoming an American citizen.