Rudolf WAGNER-RÉGENY (1903-1969)
Genesis – Oratorio for Contralto, Chorus and Small Orchestra (1956) [24:25]
Orchestral Music with Piano (1935) [15:18]
Mythological Figures (1951) [12:12]
Five French Piano Pieces (1951) [8:15]
Michaela Selinger, Contralto (Genesis)
Steffan Schleiermacher, piano (French Pieces)
Berlin Radio Choir (Genesis)
Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra/Johannes Kalitzke
rec. January 2020, Berlin Radio House
CAPRICCIO C5413 [61:00]
It seems that having the surname Wagner in the first few years of the 20th century was not an advantage to an up-and-coming composer seeking to distance himself from others of that name. Consequently, in 1920 Rudolf Wagner changed his name to Rudolf Wagner-Régeny, reflecting the name of his birthplace, Regen, in Transylvania, then part of Saxon-speaking Hungary and now Romania.
He trained from 1919 in the Leipzig Conservatoire and the Music Academy in Charlottenberg, Berlin. His wife was half Jewish, but even after the rise to power of the Nazis he chose to reside in Berlin, having made something of a name for himself as a composer of stage works. He managed to avoid persecution and was called-up in 1943; unfortunately, his health was badly affected by the experience, and also by his wife’s long illness which lead to her death from cancer in 1947. Following the Communist takeover in East Germany, he enjoyed employment in academic posts, and some degree of favour from the authorities, who, it appears, were rather less musically proscriptive than their Russian counterparts.
The most attractive work on this CD is the short oratorio Genesis, based on the bible texts. The East German communists had to pay some regard to the strong Protestant convictions of their population, and so a work such as Genesis, which wears its religion lightly, was tolerated. The work has a transparent texture, aided by the small orchestra and its succinct setting of the text. It begins with the music emerging from nothingness, the choir singing softly, describing the creation of light. As the days of creation pass, the music is predominantly slow, even the creation of the sun and moon being expressed by the contralto in simple lyrical phrases, very beautifully done by Michaela Selinger. The music speeds up for the creation of fishes and birds and finally achieves a weighty character for the creation of man. The work is entirely tonal and generates a most pleasing, if hardly shattering, listening experience.
The other works on the CD display a rather more modern palette of styles, with the earliest work, the Orchestral Music with Piano being a piano concerto in all but name. Its title was Wagner-Régeny’s response to the concept of ‘New Objectivity’, in which the excesses of Expressionism were deprecated. In private, he referred to it as his Piano Concerto. Its first movement has stomping rhythms influenced by Stravinsky and Boris Blacher (a fellow composition student of Wagner-Régeny). The second movement, a slow one, is almost Romantic in contrast, though it doesn’t really possess a memorable theme, and it transitions without interruption into a brief march. The final movement regains the atmosphere of the first, even adding a cheerful, optimistic mood to the proceedings, which is briefly interrupted by a return of the slow movement theme, before ending with a short, jubilant conclusion. The work is quite attractive, reminding me of Hindemith at times, and although I found my attention wandering during the slow movement, I shall probably return to it with interest.
The purely orchestral Mythological Figures adopts a serial technique, with each piece using the same series. The three sections refer to the Ancient Greek deities Ceres, Amphitrite and Diana, and as with many such serial works from the pens of other composers, it fails to make any sort of memorable impact on this listener, despite the booklet notes’ colourful descriptions of the three parts.
The CD ends with the Five French Piano Pieces from the same time as the Mythological Figures. The first three are titled after three perfumes popular at the time, and the last two are “hommages à la cuisine”. These rather fanciful names give us a glimpse of the composer’s liking for good food. The pieces are dodecaphonic, and the compositional technique is mentioned in their descriptions “Pastiches dodécaphoniques en metres variables”. As such, whilst not raucous or overtly dissonant, they strike me as uninteresting and not at all memorable.
To summarise, this is a well-produced issue, with fine performances and recordings and a booklet which is interesting and descriptive of the music and the composer’s life.
Jim Westhead
