Gasparo’s Twelve
Tone piano miniatures disc showed,
to those who weren’t previously aware
of it, an impressively winning Křenek
whose command of the idiom was enlivened
by a degree of impressionistic beauty
that never failed to grip and indeed
to move. Since Křenek piano discs
are hardly flavour of the month but
neither are they now, thank goodness,
the rare commodities that they
once were, it has proved a pleasure
to encounter the composer in Capriccio’s
age-spanning conspectus. Whereas Gasparo
took 1938-54 here we range from the
early 1920 Sonatine to the late Sonata
of 1988, written three years before
his death, and it represents nearly
seventy years of concentrated compositional
life.
These are superficially
more immediately appealing, perhaps,
than Gasparo’s austere-sounding Twelve
Tone selection but oddly I like them
less. I was moved by them less, as well,
and it’s hard to say why. Assuredly
this has nothing to do with the lissom
vivacity of pianist Till Alexander Körber.
In the early Sonatine for example he
catches the romantic drive fused with
hints of chromaticism that gives this
piece its dramatic tension. The post-Romantic
harmonies are quite explicit but whilst
the slow movement – a sliver under two
minutes in length – is incisive and
full of attractive chordal development
the vivace finale is a bit of a nondescript
whirl. The Twelve Variations are commendably
cogent – they’re grouped into three
(5, 3 and 4 variations) and elliptical,
tangential composition is the order
of the day. The second group of three
- two adagios and an allegretto – rises
and crests on waves of brow-furrowing
ambiguity, intensely compressed and
ultimately rather bleak. The final Adagio
variation seems to be slipping away
but then ends on a note of absolute
defiance. I can’t tell what musico-biographical
forces may have been at work in this
1937 work but one can guess and they
seem unignorable.
The
Piano Piece in Eleven Parts (1967) jumps
forward three decades to Křenek’s
American years. The work’s formal symmetry
is matched by concision and moments
of fractious outburst (listen to the
walking left hand bass of No.3!) as
well as the almost pointillist
lucidity of such as No.10. Echoes
from Austria is a series of very
short Ländler, the adduced complexity
of which is suggested in the notes.
Certainly this is, at its simplest and
most critically crude, a bittersweet
exercise but it is full of a degree
of ambivalence (see the Moderato Fifth)
and barely concealed vehemence – an
almost frantic intensity of feeling
is palpable in the last, a Larghetto-Allegro
that ends in fissure and driving collapse.
The Seventh Sonata (Op.240, 1988) adheres
to a more introspective but also playful
aesthetic, with a spare central panel,
and subsequent ascending motifs of great
(but never overwrought) complex simplicity.
It’s an eleven-minute summation of wisdom
and technical sophistication.
Körber writes
helpful notes
as well as steering us through the curve
of Křenek’s compositional development
with adroit musicality. As I said I
think the greater reserves of beauty
and precision lie in the Twelve Tone
selection but Capriccio gives us a high
vantage point over his oeuvre.
Jonathan Woolf
Till Alexander Körber (piano) 
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details