Ernst von Dohnanyi

* American Rhapsody
* Harp Concertino
* Romanza (from Serenade in C, arr. Sitkovetski)
* Violin Concerto No. 2 in c
* Wedding Waltz (from The Veil of Pierrette)

Janice Graham (violin),
Lucy Wakeford (harp),
English Sinfonia/John Farrer.
ASV CD DCA 1107  TT: 71:23

Summary for the Busy Executive: The hand that shook the hand of Brahms.

Artistic revolutions have a way of carting every non-Jacobin off to the
guillotine on their way to the New Jerusalem.  However, the New Jerusalem
never seems to arrive, and eventually people begin to wonder whatever
happened to dear old Uncle Fred.  I must confess that I kind of like this
arrangement.  I like that things get shaken up and that something forces
me to change my gaze.  I like forgetting, because the chief pleasure of
forgetting something is recalling it again and listening with a new point
of hearing.

Dohnanyi, who died in 1960, comes from the generation slightly before
Bartok and Kodaly, and the bulk of his music is absolutely contemporaneous
with the younger men, though you'd probably not guess that from the music
itself, which generally takes a post-Brahmsian line.  Mostly, he raises the
Zigeuner element from the Brahms Hungarian Dances and the Liszt Hungarian
Rhapsodies, pretty much as Brahms does in the last movements of his violin
concerto and g-minor piano quartet.  In his late period, he incorporated a
bit of circa-1900 Richard Strauss as well.  In short, with a combination
of stubbornness and brilliance my great-uncle Barney used to ascribe to
his fellow Hungarians, he kept turning out the equivalent of Victorian
love-seats in an age of Swedish Modern.  Bartok and Kodaly themselves
(especially Bartok) tended to dismiss him as a fossil, although they
recognized his importance to Hungarian musical life and their careers
benefited from his help.  However, the anachronistic nature of his work
matters less and less as time goes on, just as it no longer really matters
whether Bach and Telemann are "progressive" or "conservative."

The level of Dohnanyi's output goes up and down, from really good to a bit
loose.  At his best, I think him wonderful, thoroughly deserving of a slot
in people's consciousness.  Time was, when the only things you could find
were the Konzertstuck for cello and orchestra, the Variations on a Nursery
Tune, and the Serenade for String Trio.  I'm glad CD companies have begun
to explore his catalogue.

The "Romanza" movement from Dohnanyi's Serenade appears here in a
non-composer arrangement for strings.  It's a gorgeous movement, but the
arrangement itself strikes me as pointless.  One of the movement's marvels
is hearing a full, lush sound from only three instruments.

The American Rhapsody, Dohnanyi's musical love-letter to the United States,
where he finally settled, is a real rhapsody unlike, say, Rachmaninov's
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (really a set of variations).  Such "trick"
rhapsodies have grown on us so much, we may forget that we shouldn't expect
a great deal of organization from them.  At best, Dohnanyi's rhapsody is a
quodlibet of American tunes, folk and otherwise.  It begins with the bones
of "The Star-Spangled Banner" (as perfect for the opening of such things
as baseball games as "God Save the Queen" is for the end of a night at the
movies).  But Dohnanyi conflates the anthem with "On Top of Old Smokey,"
and shows us something about the musical structure of both tunes most of us
didn't know before.  We get an extended rumination on "Wayfaring Stranger,"
and then a simultaneous discussion of "I Gave My Love a Cherry" and "Turkey
in the Straw." "Sir Roger de Coverley," the British (Irish?) tune which
survived among Appalachian fiddlers furnishes most of the material in the
rush toward the finish line, along with "Betsy from Pike" and two other
tunes I can't identify, The work ends on a quick brass blaze of "Old
Smokey." None of this, of course, sounds anything like what we've come to
accept as American, and indeed one commentator has pointed out Hungarian
dance figures in the underbrush of the accompaniment.  We might rename the
piece A Magyar in Tallahassee.  I prefer Farrer's version to Alun Francis's
on cpo, which tries to inflate the piece in search of its Importance and
which doesn't dance nearly so well.  Farrer has much more fun and finds
more real poetry, besides.

The Harp Concertino is the last of Dohnanyi's concerted works.  It's one
of his most "advanced," leaning more toward Richard Strauss in harmonic
idiom and orchestration than to Brahms, and as such shows the limitations
of that idiom for solo harp music.  It's a lovely piece of music, but the
cello, oboe, flute, and horn take most of the interest away from the harp.
The harp becomes more of an orchestral "color," as it does in composers
like Strauss and Korngold, with surprisingly few opportunities in the
spotlight.  The French apparently understand the harp more than Germans
do.  Especially compared to Ravel's Introduction and Allegro, Dohnanyi's
harp comes off second-best in a contest of non-equals.

The waltz from The Veil of Pierrette claims nothing more than a place at
the table for great light music.  The theater piece (libretto by Schindler)
and the rest of Dohnanyi's incidental music has fallen into oblivion, but
the waltz became one of Dohnanyi's minor hits.  The Strausses, any of them,
would probably have loved to have written it.

However, the major work here, the second violin concerto, leaves all
of this behind.  Dohnanyi writes at the top of his game and brings off
a work impressive in its symphonic architecture.  In a piece filled
with unusual features, the omission of orchestral violins may be one
of the oddest.  Apparently, the composer was struck by the thought of a
single violinist on stage.  On the other hand, you don't miss the other
violins.  The limitation becomes an opportunity.  Dohnanyi creates a
darker-than-usual sound without thickness and finds unusual ways to leaven
the sound, including extensive use of the harp and more bare textures, with
the high winds combined with low strings.  The first movement contains many
motives, mostly combined in first subject group and second subject group.
A fanfare motive will have great consequences later on.  Much of the
development consists of an extensive fugato, which may or may not derive
from the first subject group (without a score I can't say for sure) and
which seamlessly leads back to a recapitulation.  The second movement,
a brief, impish scherzo, picks its way through some head-snapping chord
progressions, in a turn-of-the-century way, but at a high level of
inspiration.  The slow movement is for me the hardest to get.  There
are some gorgeous passages but some dead wood as well.  For me, the
most remarkable passage, a transition to the third movement, a kind of
accompanied cadenza which recapitulates the fanfare idea from the first
subject group of the first movement and adumbrates the main theme of the
rondo-finale (itself derived from the first-movement fugato), raises the
musical level back to its former glory.  From there on, the composer bounds
to the end, with one more surprise up his sleeve:  another accompanied
cadenza, this time with four horns.

I have another performance of this:  violinist Mark Kaplan and conductor
Lawrence Foster on Koch.  They do a great job, but so do Graham and Farrer.
There's little to prefer one over the other.  They differ slightly in that
Kaplan and Foster give the concerto more weight, whereas Graham and Foster
sing more sweetly.  ASV's recorded sound is a bit bright, but acceptable.

Steve Schwartz