When There Are No Words …
Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)
Oboe Sonata (1938)
Pavel Haas (1899-1944)
Suite for Oboe and Piano (1938)
William Bolcom (b.1938)
Aubade – for the Continuation of Life (1980)
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Temporal Variations (1936)
José Siqueira (1907-1985)
Three Etudes for Oboe and Piano (1969)
Klement Slavický (1910-1999)
Suite for Oboe and piano (1960)
Alex Klein (oboe)
Phillip Bush (piano)
rec. 2021, Gannon Hall, DePaul University, Chicago, USA
ÇEDILLE CDR90000208 [76]
There’s a revolutionary context functioning throughout this album of works for oboe and piano performed by Alex Klein, the Chicago Symphony’s principal oboe emeritus, and Phillip Bush, a versatile and expert pianist. Hindemith and Haas represent the realities of war or its imminent arrival, Bolcom and Britten stand for anti-war protest, and Siqueira and Slavickı are the two ‘exiles’ from their homelands – though, in point of fact, I’m not sure that Slavickı was ever an exile as such. He certainly – of necessity- went into an enforced internal exile as some composers did in Germany during the Second World War, but I’m not aware that he left the Czech Republic.
This serves the programmatic nature of the disc well. Hindemith’s two-movement sonata, composed in 1938, opens with an avuncular-seeming March that soon becomes touched with hints of the obsessive. It is contrasted with the long lines of the succeeding slow movement, complete with a fugal section, all of which are projected with admirable eloquence by Klein and Bush. Pavel Haas’ Suite was written in the same year as Hindemith’s Sonata but travels from angularity and doubt to an eventual belief in triumph, exemplified, as so often in Czech music, through the use of the St. Wenceslas Chorale. The music’s unsteadiness and ambiguity of expression are alike transformed into something resolute and determined.
From the wartime travails of Hindemith and Haas, the programme moves to William Bolcom’s Aubade - for the Continuation of Life written in 1980. Only six minutes in length it, too, offers a plethora of abrasion and abruptness though this eventually modifies into Copland-like freshness via a chorale. In Temporal Variations Britten produced something of a masterpiece for the instrument, allowing a range of satiric and edgy elements to permeate the writing so that, for example, the March movement (No.3) and Polka (No.8) seem to prefigure the greater sense of density and profundity to be found in the Bridge Variations that were to follow a year later. Nevertheless, Klein’s mastery of dynamics can be felt most poignantly here, not least in the Chorale (No.6).
The Brazilian composer José Siqueira found the 1964 coup made his life increasingly difficult and eventually left for the Soviet Union which is where the Three Etudes for Oboe and Piano were written in 1969. Notwithstanding the turmoil of his life at this time, the first of the three exudes nostalgic recollections whilst the second is a frolicsome and fast dance. The last, a more conventional-seeming Allegro, is both avid and joyful. The Moravian Klement Slavickı, Josef Suk’s last composition pupil, had refused to join the Communist Party in 1951 and was duly expelled from the composers’ union. His 1960 Suite for Oboe and Piano reveals his qualities of lyric invention with a freely spun Pastorale, the eloquence of the Scherzo’s B section, and the lively, enlivening Bacchanale rustico, played with resilient zest by Klein and Bush.
Not inappropriately the booklet picture is of the ruins of Coventry Cathedral. A finely balanced recording and good notes are additional features of a disc which, whilst not ‘revolutionary’ in the way it seems to suggest, addresses (obliquely) questions of inequality and unjustness in the twentieth century. More importantly, perhaps, it does so with splendidly authoritative performances.
Jonathan Woolf
