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Also available: AMERICAN CLASSICS Ernst TOCH Piano Quintet Three Impromptus • Violin Sonata No. 2 • Burlesken Spectrum Concerts Berlin
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8.559282
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Ernst Toch (1887-1964) Frank Dodge Chamber Music Frank Dodge was born in Boston in 1950 and began studying the cello at the age of sixteen. His instructors were Somehow the boy procured miniature scores of Jacobus Langendoen, Aldo Parisot, Pierre Fournier, Eberhard Finke and Maurice Gendron. He attended master- several Mozart string quartets, and, lining his own classes of Janos Starker and Mstislav Rostropovich. He received a BM from the New England Conservatory and a paper—it would still be several years before he learned MM from Yale University. He founded the Strawbery Banke Chamber Music Festival, Inc. in Portsmouth, New of the existence of music paper—he began to copy them Hampshire and was artistic director and cellist from 1969 to 1980. Frank Dodge was a founding member of the out under his bed covers at night, thereby intuitively Portsmouth Chamber Ensemble, winners in 1981 of the Artists International Competition in New York and frequent discerning the structure of the individual movements. guests on series such as the Cleveland Museum of Art at University Circle, the Harvard Musical Association, One night he thus copied out Mozart, but only up to the Carnegie Recital Hall, Bay Chamber Concerts and the Machais Bay Chamber Concerts. He lived in New York from repeat sign, thereafter improvising his own 1978 to 1982 as member of the Opera Orchestra of New York, the St Lukes Chamber Ensemble, and the Orchestra development: “Then I compared with the original,” he of Our Time, and as principal cellist of the Stanford Symphony. Fellowships from the National Endowment for the would record in a sheaf of autobiographical notes, years Arts, the New Hampshire Commission on the Arts, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, Inc. and the later: “I felt crushed. Was I a flea, a mouse, a little Greater Piscataqua Community Foundation supported his United States based endeavours. He moved to Berlin in nothing, when I compared what I did with what Mozart 1982. A two year fellowship from the Frank Huntington Beebe Fund for Musicians in Boston and two Individual did: but still I did not give up and continued to grope Artists Fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts assisted him with study abroad. From 1983 along in this way and to force Mozart to correct me. And to 1993 he performed regularly with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and in 1984 Jesús Lopez Cobos invited him he not only replaced for me every living teacher but to become a member of the National Orchestra of Spain. A Highlands tour as principal cellist of the Scottish outdid them all.” Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Jaime Laredo followed in the spring of 1985. He then returned to Berlin He would have no other. “At the same time,” where he has lived since. He founded Spectrum Concerts Berlin in 1988. The concerts were recorded by Sender When I was around ten years old, my grandfather, the Toch’s notes continue, “the irrepressible urge to write Freies Berlin for National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. His work in Berlin has been supported by the Ernst von Austro-German modernist émigré composer Ernst Toch, string quartets of my own arose and possessed me.” By Siemens Foundation in Munich, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Robert Helps Music Trust, the Körber told me about something that had happened to him when age seventeen, Toch had already composed six quartets, Foundation, The Toch Society and the Koussevitzky Music Foundation. Frank Dodge plays a cello by Antonio he was about ten years old, one of the greatest days of along with several chamber pieces. Nevertheless, Casini dated 1676 from Modena. his life, as he described it, the afternoon he happened to continually insecure in his lack of musical training, he pass a newsboy roughly his own age shouting out the had apparently abandoned hope of a musical career headline, COMPOSER BRAHMS DIES! “Then and when, suddenly, in 1909, it was announced that he had there,” he explained to me, “and for the very first time, I received the Mozart prize, the coveted award of a came to understand that one could aspire to do this quadrennial international competition for young thing, composing, for a living!” composers, which he had entered three years earlier on a It was hardly a notion he would have picked up lark (Max Reger had been the jury chairman). The prize from his family. Born in Vienna in 1887 into the included a fellowship to the Frankfurt Conservatory. distinctly unmusical household of a humble Jewish Elated and eager for his first official lesson, Toch rushed leather merchant, from the very start, this peculiar infant to Frankfurt and reported to Ivan Knorr, the head of the had mystified his parents with a near fanatic curiosity composition department. “But I was going to ask you,” about the universe of sounds. Vienna being Vienna, it stammered Knorr, “if you would allow me to study with was perhaps only natural that such a fascination quickly you.” And indeed, Toch had already achieved full evolved into a passion for music, one that was hardly maturity as a composer. Meanwhile, Toch took up encouraged in his earliest years and actively intensive study of the piano; in later years he would be discouraged as he grew older, and his father began to acclaimed for his virtuoso performances of his own fear for the boy’s eventual livelihood. Indeed, young often extremely difficult piano works. Ernst was forced to pursue his investigations in secret. Toch’s First Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 21,
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Hartmut Rohde composed in 1912 (and not included on this recording), of his later music can only be fully appreciated in the bears full-bodied and hearty witness to the vibrancy of context of the profound melancholy that remained the Hartmut Rohde began studying the violin and viola at the age of nine in the first period in Toch’s lifework. Intensely lyrical and composer’s first home. Celle. He studied with Hatto Beyerle (Alban Berg Quartet) in Vienna and unabashedly romantic—in later years, Toch dubbed it Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933, ruptured Hanover, and is now professor of viola at Berlin’s University of Arts and “Brahms’s Fourth Violin Sonata”—the piece clearly Toch’s life at mid-career. For his escape he took guest professor at the Royal Academy in London. He is a founding testifies to the Viennese roots of the composer’s advantage of the fact that he had earlier been selected to member of the Kandinsky String Trio and the Mozart Piano Quartet. He inspiration, and was typical of much of Toch’s early represent Germany, alongside Richard Strauss, at a frequently tours the United States, Australia, Europe and Korea and has work. musicological conference in Florence, Italy. He simply performed at the Festivals of Salzburg and of Berlin, the Pablo Casals World War I, during which the composer served never returned, traveling instead to Paris (from where he Festival, Ravinia Festival and the Rheingau Festival. Hartmut Rohde has with the Austrian army on the Italian/Slovenian and cabled his wife with their pre-arranged all-clear signal: recorded for Decca, Arte Nova and Darbinghaus und Grimm. In 2003 he then Galician fronts, largely silenced Toch for almost “I have my pencil”) (as if that was all he was going to received the Echo Classic Prize together with the Leipzig String Quartet five years, but the silence veiled a profound inner need); then to London (where he served as composer for for their recording of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen and Capriccio. He is winner of the first prize of the German transformation. As his creative energies resurfaced, the Berthold Viertel film production that would feature, Music Competition, the Salzburg International Academy Mozarteum and the Best Interpretation of Contemporary Toch moved to the vanguard of the modernist Neue just barely veiled, as backdrop to Christopher Music at the Naumburg Competition in New York. Hartmut Rohde plays a viola by Michael Ledfuß (2002) and a Musik movement. Soon established in Berlin, he Isherwood’s novel Prater Violet); on to New York violin by Giuseppe Fiorini (1899). generated a steadily expanding reputation through a (where he figured in the founding faculty of the massively prolific production, including bold new University in Exile at the New School); and finally on to concerti, operas, chamber works, solo pieces, and Southern California, where he arrived in 1935, experimental innovations (such as the celebrated summoned by Hollywood. And at first it seemed that Daniel Blumenthal Geographical Fugue, the first such piece ever fashioned that pencil was indeed going to be all that would need, for spoken chorus). No longer bound to his early certainly on the basis of the powerful and defiantly vivid Daniel Blumenthal enjoys an international reputation as soloist, concert romantic idiom, Toch nevertheless insisted on nurturing Piano Quintet, Op. 64, he produced a few years later musician and chamber musician. He is professor at the Royal the organic interpenetration of innovation and tradition. (1938), under a commission from Elizabeth Sprague Conservatory in Brussels, and of the Thy Masterclass Chamber Music (“Although I pass for a modernist and even an Coolidge, the premiere American patron of chamber Festival in Denmark. His discography includes over eighty recordings. atonalist,” he once explained, “my music is in no way composition. But the fact is that, whereas back in Daniel Blumenthal was born in Landstuhl, Germany, and began his atonal. It is rooted in tonality, which is, however, treated Germany his work had regularly communed with a musical training at the age of five. He received his Bachelor of Music from in hovering, gyrating manner, gravitating always vividly engaged audience and musical scene (a scene the University of Michigan and his Master of Music degree and Doctor of towards definite tonal centers.”) One of the Schott now completely closed off to him), in America it fell Musical Arts from the Juilliard School in New York. He is a laureate of the publishing powerhouse’s leading composers throughout largely on deaf ears (the Quintet, for example, would Sydney, Leeds, Geneva, Busoni, and the Queen Elisabeth competitions. In the Weimar years, Toch’s works were regularly not find a publisher till well after the war). He taught 1995 he was on the jury of the Queen Elisabeth Competition for Piano. He performed by the likes of Walter Gieseking, Emanuel (Andre Previn, among others); he scored for is an honorary member and musical advisor of Icons of Europe, Brussels. Feuermann, Otto Klemperer and the young William Hollywood, where his acerbic modernist manner was Steinberg—and “The Juggler,” in particular, the thought ideal for horror effects (Doctor Cyclops) and rollicking final movement of the Burlesken, Op. 31 chase scenes (as in Shirley Temple’s sleigh ride in (1923) piano pieces featured on this recording, proved a Heidi). Bit by bit however his own creative impulses perennial encore favorite. Similarly successful was dried up. (“For quite some time,” he wrote his by-now Toch’s Second Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 44 dear friend Mrs. Coolidge in 1943, “I am not in a very (1928), featured on this recording. The poignant happy frame of mind. Disappointments and sorrows melancholy of the middle movement suggests what render me frustrated and lonesome. I become somehow remained perhaps the dominant mood throughout reluctant to go on writing if my work remains more or Toch’s oeuvre: indeed the variously Puckish good less paper in desks and on shelves.”) By war’s end he humor and surging, pounding vitality that animate much would learn that fully half of his extended family (over
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thirty souls) whom he’d been desperately trying to line of ancestors,” he once declared, “and that each Annette von Hehn rescue had perished in the Holocaust. He seemed a creating artist, involuntarily, is placed as a link in that broken man, or at any rate a composer with a shattered chain. He cooperates on the continuity to the degree in Annette von Hehn, born in Kiel in 1978, began violin lessons at the age of pencil. which the timeless is more important to him than the four. She studied with Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School, New York But then, in 1948, he was felled by a devastating, time-bound.” where she received her BM degree. She continued her studies with Ilan near-fatal heart attack, from which he somehow And indeed, in recent years Toch has been being Gronich at the University of Arts in Berlin. She was a member of the emerged on the verge of a stupendous regeneration. He rediscovered—there have been over twenty recordings Orchestra Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic from 2001-2003 and has gave up teaching and Hollywood, and over the issued in the last ten years, including splendid new attended masterclasses of Itzhak Perlman, Ida Haendel and Igor Oistrakh. remaining fifteen years of his life—perhaps his most renderings of all the symphonies and all the string In 2001 Annette von Hehn won the Munich ARD competition and productive—he composed seven symphonies (the Third quartets, and now here the Piano Quintet and that early performed solo concerts throughout Europe and in North and South of which won the Pulitzer Prize), countless new Violin Sonata—and Toch’s work is indeed being America. The ATOS Trio, of which Annette is violinist, founded in 2003, chamber works, a new opera, in addition to the sorts of reassessed in terms he would have preferred, as but a was first prize winner of the 5th Melbourne International Chamber Music solo pieces represented in this collection by his single link in that long chain. And as such, Toch’s music Competition in 2007 and awarded in the same year the American Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson International Trio Impromptu for Cello, Op. 90c, originally fashioned as a is being prized for the mastery of its craftsmanship and Award. The Trio appears at festivals such as the Schleswig-Holstein Musikfestival and the Schwetzinger Festspiele. birthday offering for his dear friend Gregor Piatigorsky the depth of its inspiration. in 1963: lean, sinewy, elegiac, and powerfully moving. Toch died the following year, wistfully convinced that Lawrence Weschler Julia-Maria Kretz he had become, as he often told his friend Nicolas Slonimsky, “the world’s most forgotten composer.” Lawrence Weschler, a long-time staff writer at the New Julia-Maria Kretz was born in Berlin in 1980. She began her musical And so it seemed for many years that he might Yorker and the current director of the New York Institute studies at the age of nine with Marianne Boettcher at the Julius Stern indeed have been, often dismissed as way too modernist for the Humanities, is the author, among others, of Mr. Institute of the University of the Arts in Berlin. She then studied with for traditional audiences and too traditional for their Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Everything that Rises, Thomas Brandis at the Berlin University of Arts and with Josef Suk in modernist counterparts. Vermeer in Bosnia, and the biographical preface to his Prague. She was winner of the German Jugend musiziert competition, and “I believe that we can only be the product of a long grandfather Ernst Toch’s The Shaping Forces in Music. is a fellow of the German national scholarship foundation and of the PE- Friends for Music Scholars. She was awarded the WDR (West German Radio) classical prize and the the Rauhe Prize, Hamburg in 2005. She is also first prize winner of the Marie Luise Imbusch Competition. Her piano trio was awarded the WDR classical prize and first prize of the Premio Vittorio Gui in Florence (2004), the Premio Trio di Trieste (2005) and the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Competition in Berlin (2005). As a soloist, Julia-Maria Kretz has appeared with the Berlin and Nuremberg Symphony Orchestras, the Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra and the Bad Reichenhall Philharmonic Orchestra. She has also appeared with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and has performed at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, the Young Prague International Music Festival, the Utrecht International Chamber Music Festival and the Salzburg Mozarttage. With her piano trio she has recorded for the Czech, the West German, North German and Southwest German broadcasting companies. She plays a violin by Joseph Nicola Gagliano, Naples, ca. 1791.
All photographs by Eckhard Joite
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thirty souls) whom he’d been desperately trying to line of ancestors,” he once declared, “and that each Annette von Hehn rescue had perished in the Holocaust. He seemed a creating artist, involuntarily, is placed as a link in that broken man, or at any rate a composer with a shattered chain. He cooperates on the continuity to the degree in Annette von Hehn, born in Kiel in 1978, began violin lessons at the age of pencil. which the timeless is more important to him than the four. She studied with Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School, New York But then, in 1948, he was felled by a devastating, time-bound.” where she received her BM degree. She continued her studies with Ilan near-fatal heart attack, from which he somehow And indeed, in recent years Toch has been being Gronich at the University of Arts in Berlin. She was a member of the emerged on the verge of a stupendous regeneration. He rediscovered—there have been over twenty recordings Orchestra Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic from 2001-2003 and has gave up teaching and Hollywood, and over the issued in the last ten years, including splendid new attended masterclasses of Itzhak Perlman, Ida Haendel and Igor Oistrakh. remaining fifteen years of his life—perhaps his most renderings of all the symphonies and all the string In 2001 Annette von Hehn won the Munich ARD competition and productive—he composed seven symphonies (the Third quartets, and now here the Piano Quintet and that early performed solo concerts throughout Europe and in North and South of which won the Pulitzer Prize), countless new Violin Sonata—and Toch’s work is indeed being America. The ATOS Trio, of which Annette is violinist, founded in 2003, chamber works, a new opera, in addition to the sorts of reassessed in terms he would have preferred, as but a was first prize winner of the 5th Melbourne International Chamber Music solo pieces represented in this collection by his single link in that long chain. And as such, Toch’s music Competition in 2007 and awarded in the same year the American Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson International Trio Impromptu for Cello, Op. 90c, originally fashioned as a is being prized for the mastery of its craftsmanship and Award. The Trio appears at festivals such as the Schleswig-Holstein Musikfestival and the Schwetzinger Festspiele. birthday offering for his dear friend Gregor Piatigorsky the depth of its inspiration. in 1963: lean, sinewy, elegiac, and powerfully moving. Toch died the following year, wistfully convinced that Lawrence Weschler Julia-Maria Kretz he had become, as he often told his friend Nicolas Slonimsky, “the world’s most forgotten composer.” Lawrence Weschler, a long-time staff writer at the New Julia-Maria Kretz was born in Berlin in 1980. She began her musical And so it seemed for many years that he might Yorker and the current director of the New York Institute studies at the age of nine with Marianne Boettcher at the Julius Stern indeed have been, often dismissed as way too modernist for the Humanities, is the author, among others, of Mr. Institute of the University of the Arts in Berlin. She then studied with for traditional audiences and too traditional for their Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Everything that Rises, Thomas Brandis at the Berlin University of Arts and with Josef Suk in modernist counterparts. Vermeer in Bosnia, and the biographical preface to his Prague. She was winner of the German Jugend musiziert competition, and “I believe that we can only be the product of a long grandfather Ernst Toch’s The Shaping Forces in Music. is a fellow of the German national scholarship foundation and of the PE- Friends for Music Scholars. She was awarded the WDR (West German Radio) classical prize and the the Rauhe Prize, Hamburg in 2005. She is also first prize winner of the Marie Luise Imbusch Competition. Her piano trio was awarded the WDR classical prize and first prize of the Premio Vittorio Gui in Florence (2004), the Premio Trio di Trieste (2005) and the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Competition in Berlin (2005). As a soloist, Julia-Maria Kretz has appeared with the Berlin and Nuremberg Symphony Orchestras, the Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra and the Bad Reichenhall Philharmonic Orchestra. She has also appeared with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and has performed at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, the Young Prague International Music Festival, the Utrecht International Chamber Music Festival and the Salzburg Mozarttage. With her piano trio she has recorded for the Czech, the West German, North German and Southwest German broadcasting companies. She plays a violin by Joseph Nicola Gagliano, Naples, ca. 1791.
All photographs by Eckhard Joite
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Hartmut Rohde composed in 1912 (and not included on this recording), of his later music can only be fully appreciated in the bears full-bodied and hearty witness to the vibrancy of context of the profound melancholy that remained the Hartmut Rohde began studying the violin and viola at the age of nine in the first period in Toch’s lifework. Intensely lyrical and composer’s first home. Celle. He studied with Hatto Beyerle (Alban Berg Quartet) in Vienna and unabashedly romantic—in later years, Toch dubbed it Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933, ruptured Hanover, and is now professor of viola at Berlin’s University of Arts and “Brahms’s Fourth Violin Sonata”—the piece clearly Toch’s life at mid-career. For his escape he took guest professor at the Royal Academy in London. He is a founding testifies to the Viennese roots of the composer’s advantage of the fact that he had earlier been selected to member of the Kandinsky String Trio and the Mozart Piano Quartet. He inspiration, and was typical of much of Toch’s early represent Germany, alongside Richard Strauss, at a frequently tours the United States, Australia, Europe and Korea and has work. musicological conference in Florence, Italy. He simply performed at the Festivals of Salzburg and of Berlin, the Pablo Casals World War I, during which the composer served never returned, traveling instead to Paris (from where he Festival, Ravinia Festival and the Rheingau Festival. Hartmut Rohde has with the Austrian army on the Italian/Slovenian and cabled his wife with their pre-arranged all-clear signal: recorded for Decca, Arte Nova and Darbinghaus und Grimm. In 2003 he then Galician fronts, largely silenced Toch for almost “I have my pencil”) (as if that was all he was going to received the Echo Classic Prize together with the Leipzig String Quartet five years, but the silence veiled a profound inner need); then to London (where he served as composer for for their recording of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen and Capriccio. He is winner of the first prize of the German transformation. As his creative energies resurfaced, the Berthold Viertel film production that would feature, Music Competition, the Salzburg International Academy Mozarteum and the Best Interpretation of Contemporary Toch moved to the vanguard of the modernist Neue just barely veiled, as backdrop to Christopher Music at the Naumburg Competition in New York. Hartmut Rohde plays a viola by Michael Ledfuß (2002) and a Musik movement. Soon established in Berlin, he Isherwood’s novel Prater Violet); on to New York violin by Giuseppe Fiorini (1899). generated a steadily expanding reputation through a (where he figured in the founding faculty of the massively prolific production, including bold new University in Exile at the New School); and finally on to concerti, operas, chamber works, solo pieces, and Southern California, where he arrived in 1935, experimental innovations (such as the celebrated summoned by Hollywood. And at first it seemed that Daniel Blumenthal Geographical Fugue, the first such piece ever fashioned that pencil was indeed going to be all that would need, for spoken chorus). No longer bound to his early certainly on the basis of the powerful and defiantly vivid Daniel Blumenthal enjoys an international reputation as soloist, concert romantic idiom, Toch nevertheless insisted on nurturing Piano Quintet, Op. 64, he produced a few years later musician and chamber musician. He is professor at the Royal the organic interpenetration of innovation and tradition. (1938), under a commission from Elizabeth Sprague Conservatory in Brussels, and of the Thy Masterclass Chamber Music (“Although I pass for a modernist and even an Coolidge, the premiere American patron of chamber Festival in Denmark. His discography includes over eighty recordings. atonalist,” he once explained, “my music is in no way composition. But the fact is that, whereas back in Daniel Blumenthal was born in Landstuhl, Germany, and began his atonal. It is rooted in tonality, which is, however, treated Germany his work had regularly communed with a musical training at the age of five. He received his Bachelor of Music from in hovering, gyrating manner, gravitating always vividly engaged audience and musical scene (a scene the University of Michigan and his Master of Music degree and Doctor of towards definite tonal centers.”) One of the Schott now completely closed off to him), in America it fell Musical Arts from the Juilliard School in New York. He is a laureate of the publishing powerhouse’s leading composers throughout largely on deaf ears (the Quintet, for example, would Sydney, Leeds, Geneva, Busoni, and the Queen Elisabeth competitions. In the Weimar years, Toch’s works were regularly not find a publisher till well after the war). He taught 1995 he was on the jury of the Queen Elisabeth Competition for Piano. He performed by the likes of Walter Gieseking, Emanuel (Andre Previn, among others); he scored for is an honorary member and musical advisor of Icons of Europe, Brussels. Feuermann, Otto Klemperer and the young William Hollywood, where his acerbic modernist manner was Steinberg—and “The Juggler,” in particular, the thought ideal for horror effects (Doctor Cyclops) and rollicking final movement of the Burlesken, Op. 31 chase scenes (as in Shirley Temple’s sleigh ride in (1923) piano pieces featured on this recording, proved a Heidi). Bit by bit however his own creative impulses perennial encore favorite. Similarly successful was dried up. (“For quite some time,” he wrote his by-now Toch’s Second Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 44 dear friend Mrs. Coolidge in 1943, “I am not in a very (1928), featured on this recording. The poignant happy frame of mind. Disappointments and sorrows melancholy of the middle movement suggests what render me frustrated and lonesome. I become somehow remained perhaps the dominant mood throughout reluctant to go on writing if my work remains more or Toch’s oeuvre: indeed the variously Puckish good less paper in desks and on shelves.”) By war’s end he humor and surging, pounding vitality that animate much would learn that fully half of his extended family (over
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Ernst Toch (1887-1964) Frank Dodge Chamber Music Frank Dodge was born in Boston in 1950 and began studying the cello at the age of sixteen. His instructors were Somehow the boy procured miniature scores of Jacobus Langendoen, Aldo Parisot, Pierre Fournier, Eberhard Finke and Maurice Gendron. He attended master- several Mozart string quartets, and, lining his own classes of Janos Starker and Mstislav Rostropovich. He received a BM from the New England Conservatory and a paper—it would still be several years before he learned MM from Yale University. He founded the Strawbery Banke Chamber Music Festival, Inc. in Portsmouth, New of the existence of music paper—he began to copy them Hampshire and was artistic director and cellist from 1969 to 1980. Frank Dodge was a founding member of the out under his bed covers at night, thereby intuitively Portsmouth Chamber Ensemble, winners in 1981 of the Artists International Competition in New York and frequent discerning the structure of the individual movements. guests on series such as the Cleveland Museum of Art at University Circle, the Harvard Musical Association, One night he thus copied out Mozart, but only up to the Carnegie Recital Hall, Bay Chamber Concerts and the Machais Bay Chamber Concerts. He lived in New York from repeat sign, thereafter improvising his own 1978 to 1982 as member of the Opera Orchestra of New York, the St Lukes Chamber Ensemble, and the Orchestra development: “Then I compared with the original,” he of Our Time, and as principal cellist of the Stanford Symphony. Fellowships from the National Endowment for the would record in a sheaf of autobiographical notes, years Arts, the New Hampshire Commission on the Arts, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, Inc. and the later: “I felt crushed. Was I a flea, a mouse, a little Greater Piscataqua Community Foundation supported his United States based endeavours. He moved to Berlin in nothing, when I compared what I did with what Mozart 1982. A two year fellowship from the Frank Huntington Beebe Fund for Musicians in Boston and two Individual did: but still I did not give up and continued to grope Artists Fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts assisted him with study abroad. From 1983 along in this way and to force Mozart to correct me. And to 1993 he performed regularly with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and in 1984 Jesús Lopez Cobos invited him he not only replaced for me every living teacher but to become a member of the National Orchestra of Spain. A Highlands tour as principal cellist of the Scottish outdid them all.” Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Jaime Laredo followed in the spring of 1985. He then returned to Berlin He would have no other. “At the same time,” where he has lived since. He founded Spectrum Concerts Berlin in 1988. The concerts were recorded by Sender When I was around ten years old, my grandfather, the Toch’s notes continue, “the irrepressible urge to write Freies Berlin for National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. His work in Berlin has been supported by the Ernst von Austro-German modernist émigré composer Ernst Toch, string quartets of my own arose and possessed me.” By Siemens Foundation in Munich, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Robert Helps Music Trust, the Körber told me about something that had happened to him when age seventeen, Toch had already composed six quartets, Foundation, The Toch Society and the Koussevitzky Music Foundation. Frank Dodge plays a cello by Antonio he was about ten years old, one of the greatest days of along with several chamber pieces. Nevertheless, Casini dated 1676 from Modena. his life, as he described it, the afternoon he happened to continually insecure in his lack of musical training, he pass a newsboy roughly his own age shouting out the had apparently abandoned hope of a musical career headline, COMPOSER BRAHMS DIES! “Then and when, suddenly, in 1909, it was announced that he had there,” he explained to me, “and for the very first time, I received the Mozart prize, the coveted award of a came to understand that one could aspire to do this quadrennial international competition for young thing, composing, for a living!” composers, which he had entered three years earlier on a It was hardly a notion he would have picked up lark (Max Reger had been the jury chairman). The prize from his family. Born in Vienna in 1887 into the included a fellowship to the Frankfurt Conservatory. distinctly unmusical household of a humble Jewish Elated and eager for his first official lesson, Toch rushed leather merchant, from the very start, this peculiar infant to Frankfurt and reported to Ivan Knorr, the head of the had mystified his parents with a near fanatic curiosity composition department. “But I was going to ask you,” about the universe of sounds. Vienna being Vienna, it stammered Knorr, “if you would allow me to study with was perhaps only natural that such a fascination quickly you.” And indeed, Toch had already achieved full evolved into a passion for music, one that was hardly maturity as a composer. Meanwhile, Toch took up encouraged in his earliest years and actively intensive study of the piano; in later years he would be discouraged as he grew older, and his father began to acclaimed for his virtuoso performances of his own fear for the boy’s eventual livelihood. Indeed, young often extremely difficult piano works. Ernst was forced to pursue his investigations in secret. Toch’s First Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 21,
8.559324 27 8.559324 559324 bk Toch US 2/15/08 12:30 PM Page 8
Also available: AMERICAN CLASSICS Ernst TOCH Piano Quintet Three Impromptus • Violin Sonata No. 2 • Burlesken Spectrum Concerts Berlin
8.559199
8.559282
8.559324 8 CMYK NAXOS Playing Ernst Time: TOCH 68:57 (1887-1964) TOCH: Disc made in Canada. Printed and assembled USA. this compact disc prohibited. reserved. Unauthorised public performance, broadcasting and copying of All rights in this sound recording, artwork, texts and translations 8.559324 Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2, Op. 44 (1928)* 13:16 AMERICAN CLASSICS 1 Trotzig, anstürmend 6:35 Since 1997 Spectrum Concerts Berlin has 2 Intermezzo. Tänzerisch – graziös (Allegretto) 2:54 made an important contribution to the 3 growing recognition and appreciation of Piano Quintet • Violin Sonata No. 2 • Burlesken Allegro giusto 3:47 Ernst Toch’s unique musical voice. One Burlesken for Piano, Op. 31 (1923) 9:28 of the most neglected 20th-century 4 Gemächlich 4:20 composers, and a noted teacher and writer on musical composition, Toch was a self- 5 Lebhaft 3:15 taught modernist who learned music’s 6 Der Jongleur: Muito vivo (Sehr lebhaft) 1:53 fundamentals from the Mozart string quartets. This rare recording of Toch’s & Three Impromptus for Cello, solo and chamber music features the Op. 90c (1963) 9:11 powerful and defiantly vivid Piano Quintet 2008 Naxos Rights International Ltd. 7 Andante cantabile 2:58 (1938), written in Hollywood following the 8 Allegretto grazioso 1:38 composer’s escape to the USA, and the 9 Adagio, con espressione 4:35 poignantly melancholy Violin Sonata No. 2 (1928), a product of Toch’s Berlin years Quintet for Piano, two Violins, when his music was regularly performed Viola and Cello, Op. 64 (1938) 37:02 to appreciative audiences. 0 The Lyrical Part: Allegro non troppo 13:23 ! The Whimsical Part 5:46 @ The Contemplative Part: Adagio 10:34 # The Dramatic Part 7:19 Spectrum Concerts Berlin www.spectrumconcerts.com Daniel Blumenthal, Piano • Annette von Hehn, Violin* This disc has been generously supported Julia-Maria Kretz, Violin • Hartmut Rohde, Viola by the Ernst Toch Society, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc. and was co- Piano Quintet • Violin Sonata No. 2 • Burlesken Violin Piano Quintet • DDD Frank Dodge, Cello produced with Deutschlandradio. A co-production with Deutschlandradio Kultur Recorded on 4th and 5th May, 2007 (Tracks 1-9), and on 20th and
21st December, 2007 (tracks 10-13), at the Siemens Villa, Berlin. 8.559324
TOCH: TOCH: www.naxos.com 8.559324 Recording director: Christoph Franke Engineer: Henri Thaon • Technician: Susanne Beyer Booklet notes: Lawrence Toch Weschler • Publishers: Schott Musik, Mills Music, Inc., Delkas Music Publishing Company Cover image: Angel © Alan Magee NAXOS