Ernst Toch (photo Schott Music / G. Tillmann-Matter) |
The main focus and
interest of the Continuum Ensemble’s weekend of concerts and talks
at Kings Place under the banner of ‘Swept Away’ was the music of
Ernst Toch (1889–1964). He was a key member of the Neue
Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement in inter-war Germany,
alongside Hindemith and Weill, but his music and reputation, unlike
those of his colleagues, didn’t survive his exile in the US to
nearly the same extent. In his heyday, in the 1920s, his music was
performed by the likes of Klemperer and Furtwängler; Emmanuel
Feuermann played his Cello Concerto and Walter Gieseking gave more
than 50 performances of his Piano Concerto. He wrote in all the main
media, from chamber music to opera. But when the Nazis came to power
in 1933, the Jewish composer suddenly found his music proscribed, and
he fled to the US, where he was among the first to follow what would
soon become a well-worn trail from Germany to Hollywood. There he
became the go-to composer for chase scenes and horror films, though
without achieving the film-music success of Korngold, Waxman or
Steiner, and he only slowly returned to writing concert music late in
life. A more personal exposition of his life as an exile can be read
here in the words of his grandson Lawrence Weschler.
But to return to his
music of the Weimar Republic era in Germany, these concerts perhaps
gave us the most exposure it has yet had in Britain and included more
than half a dozen UK premieres. I have already mentioned his
miniature opera Egon und Emilie
in a previous post and I will discuss the performances of his sonatas
for violin and for cello in a forthcoming review in The
Strad. The select discography of
Toch’s music, most notably on the German CPO label, has passed me
by, so this was my first real encounter with it beyond the perennial
Geographical Fugue
(performed alongside his other ‘spoken music’ pieces by the
exemplary BBC Singers).
Was
this, then, going to be a revelation of finding a key figure from the
period the quality of whose music one cannot understand being so
neglected – on a par with the rediscovery of Korngold, Schreker,
Zemlinsky and others in recent decades? I’m afraid that, on the
basis of the music performed here, the case remains open. There’s
no denying that Toch sounds like no one else, but there’s also a
saminess about much of his writing in the 1920s – ostinatos,
relentless fury, parallel harmonies and so on – that was
highlighted by Erik Levi’s illustration of the contrasting range of
Erwin Schulhoff’s output over the same period in his talk on Weimar
Republic music. The piano miniatures played with great energy by
Douglas Finch exemplified this, with their love of extremes and often
unforgiving forcefulness, exemplified by ‘Der Jongleur’ from his
Three Burlesques of 1923, which, as Prof. Levi also illustrated in
his talk, Toch transcribed for player piano to give it even more
super-human forcefulness. Indeed, his music suffered a little by
comparison with that of his colleagues that surrounded it in these
concerts: Weill (a moving account of the Berliner Requiem
by the BBC Singers), Krenek, Wolpe and Hindemith.
The
expansion into more chamber-orchestral forces brought welcome variety
of colour in the Five Pieces of 1924, but the similarity of the
individual movements, where short nuggets of motifs are rather worked
to death in swirls of parallel harmonies, left me underwhelmed – at
times it was rather atmospheric, but also somewhat one-dimensional.
It didn’t help that the Continuum Ensemble, conducted by Philip
Headlam, lacked the weight of strings to mitigate lapses of
intonation and bring greater solidity to the meandering lines.
But
there was one particular revelation in Die Chinesische
Flöte of 1922. Although this
piece doesn’t seem to be able to make up its mind if it’s a
chamber symphony or a song cycle, there’s more imagination, colour
and expressive range here than found in the other music performed
over the weekend of concerts. It alternates instrumental movements
with three songs setting texts translated from the Chinese from the
same collection upon which Mahler drew for Das Lied von der
Erde. The music is framed by a
rather effective percussive cortège accompanying a languid melody
(not unlike the effect of Ravel’s Boléro)
and in his vocal writing – effortlessly sung here by Sarah Tynan –
Toch at last reveals a lyrical side that has been sorely missed
elsewhere. In the song ‘The Rat’ one can hear why his music would
later be sought for movie chase scenes, but it was the more
reflective side of the work that had greatest impact, not least the
beautiful flute playing from the Continuum’s Lisa Nelson, which
played an important role in the performance.
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