AMERICAN CLASSICS Ernst TOCH Piano Quintet Three Impromptus • Violin Sonata No
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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 559324 bk Toch US 2/15/08 12:30 PM Page 2 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 6 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.