Berlin 1923, Beethoven & Schulhoff by Herbert Schuch

Ludwig van Beethoven, Erwin Schulhoff

Herbert Schuch

Berlin 1923, Beethoven & Schulhoff

Format: CD
Label: CAvi
UPC: 4260085535392
Catnr: AVI 8553539
Release date: 01 December 2023
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Label
CAvi

UPC
4260085535392

Catalogue number
AVI 8553539

Release date
01 December 2023

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

About the album

Beethoven und Schulhoff in Dialogue

Schuch: “Indeed, it’s quite exciting to look at what was going on exactly 100 years ago – perhaps because 1923 doesn’t seem all that distant to us. Certain events and circumstances seem to mirror one another a century apart. From a musical point of view, Erwin Schulhoff’s piano concerto is a truly interesting work that has not attained the recognition it deserves. . …

In terms of style, the piano concerto, composed between 11 June and 10 July 1923, is one of those works where Schulhoff radically deals with the dance types of jazz, which had crossed the Atlantic at the end of the First World War and spread out from Paris until taking all of Europe by storm….. No other pair of composers could be more different – on paper – than these two.

Schulhoff always took a decisive stance against traditionalism. Indeed, he may have been something of an iconoclast, but he was also a talented and well-trained pianist – a pianist who wanted to earn success in that very role. Of course, Schulhoff studied the Beethoven concertos, performed them, and ultimately also took the opportunity (like many other composers before him) to put his stamp on these works by writing his own cadenzas……

…It was also in Berlin – in February 1923, to be exact – that Schulhoff conceived and worked out the cadenzas for the first four Beethoven piano concertos …….“(Excerpts from the booklets notes)

Beethoven und Schulhoff im Dialog
Schuch: „Es ist tatsächlich gerade sehr spannend zu schauen, was vor genau 100 Jahren war – vielleicht, weil das Jahr 1923 vom Gefühl her gar nicht so ganz weit weg ist und sich manche Dinge zu spiegeln scheinen. Musikalisch ist das Klavierkonzert von Erwin Schulhoff dabei ein wirklich interessantes Werk, das heute leider nicht den Platz einnimmt, den es eigentlich haben könnte. ……..

Stilistisch gehört das zwischen dem 11.Juni und 10.Juli 1923 entstandene Klavierkonzert zu jenen Werken, in denen sich Schulhoff in radikaler Weise mit den Tanztypen des Jazz auseinandersetzt, die seit dem Ende des Ersten Weltkrieg von Amerika über Paris ganz Europa im Sturm eroberten……..

Auf dem Papier könnten diese beiden Komponisten nicht gegensätzlicher sein. Schulhoff hat sich ja immer wieder lautstark gegen Traditionalismus ausgesprochen. Er ist ein bisschen wie ein Bilderstürmer aufgetreten, gleichzeitig war er aber ebenso ein begabter und sehr gut ausgebildeter Pianist – ein Pianist, der auch als solcher reüssieren wollte. Natürlich hat er sich mit den Beethoven-Klavierkonzerten auseinandergesetzt, hat sie gespielt und letztlich auch die Gelegenheit ergriffen (wie so viele andere Komponisten zuvor), über die Kadenz dem jeweiligen Werk einen eigenen Stempel aufzudrücken……..

Bereits im Februar 1923 hatte Schulhoff – ebenfalls in Berlin – die Kadenzen zu den ersten vier Klavierkonzerten von Ludwig van Beethoven ausgearbeitet ...“(Auszug aus dem Booklettext)

Artist(s)

Herbert Schuch (piano)

Pianist Herbert Schuch has gained a reputation as one of the most interesting musicians of his generation with his strikingly conceived concert programmes and CD recordings.
He has worked with a number of renowned orchestras, including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the NHK Symphony Orchestra, the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Bamberg Symphony, the Dresden Philharmonic and the radio orchestras of hr, MDR, WDR, NDR Hannover und Danish Radio, as well as with the Camerata Salzburg and the Festival Strings Lucerne, with conductors such as Pierre Boulez, Valery Gergiev, Jakub Hru° ša, Jun Märkl, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Jonathan Nott, Markus Poschner, Michael Sanderling, and Mario Venzago.
Herbert Schuch was born in Timi¸soara, Romania, in 1979. He had his first piano lessons in his native city with Prof. Maria Bodo, before his family moved to Germany in 1988, where he has lived since.
He continued his musical studies with Kurt Hantsch and then with Prof. Karl-Heinz Kämmerling at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Recently, Herbert Schuch has been especially influenced by his encounters and work with Alfred Brendel.
As a child, Herbert Schuch also played violin for 10 years and has been an enthusiastic chamber musician ever since, sharing the stage with musicians of the likes of Nicolas Altstaedt, Vilde Frang, Julia Fischer, Maximilian Hornung, Sebastian Manz, and Daniel Müller-Schott.
He also forms a successful piano duo with Gülru Ensari: together, they have recorded three releases for the CAvi-music label, featuring a wide range of repertoire from different periods.
In addition to his performance activities, Herbert Schuch is also involved in the organization Rhapsody in School, founded by Lars Vogt, which promotes classical music education in schools.

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WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne

Tung-Chieh Chuang (conductor)

Since the beginning of the 2021/2022 season Tung-Chieh Chuang has been Generalmusikdirektor of the Bochumer Symphoniker and Intendant of the Anneliese Brost Musikforum Ruhr / Germany. This young and up-and-coming conductor from Taiwan laid the foundation for his international career in 2015 by winning the International Malko Competition in Copenhagen. Before that, he had already won prizes at the Sir Georg Solti International Conducting Competition in Frankfurt, the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg and the Jeunesses Musicales International Conducting Competition in Bucharest. In 2010 Chuang received the Edwin B. Garrigues Fellowship of the Curtis Institute of Music. In 2012 he launched the first orchestral ‘flashmob’ in Taiwan. Born into a family of professional musicians, Chuang learned to play the horn and the piano from an early age, giving his...

Since the beginning of the 2021/2022 season Tung-Chieh Chuang has been Generalmusikdirektor of the Bochumer Symphoniker and Intendant of the Anneliese Brost Musikforum Ruhr / Germany. This young and up-and-coming conductor from Taiwan laid the foundation for his international career in 2015 by winning the International Malko Competition in Copenhagen.
Before that, he had already won prizes at the Sir Georg Solti International Conducting Competition in Frankfurt, the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg and the Jeunesses Musicales International Conducting Competition in Bucharest. In 2010 Chuang received the Edwin B. Garrigues Fellowship of the Curtis Institute of Music. In 2012 he launched the first orchestral ‘flashmob’ in Taiwan.
Born into a family of professional musicians, Chuang learned to play the horn and the piano from an early age, giving his first public concert at the age of eleven. He continued his studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and the Hochschule für Musik “Franz Liszt” Weimar.
His mentors include Mark Gibson, Gustav Meier, Otto-Werner Mueller and Nicolás Pasquet. The conductor resides with his family in Bochum.

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Composer(s)

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers. His best-known compositions include nine symphonies, five piano concertos, one violin concerto, 32 piano sonatas, 16 string quartets, his great Mass the Missa solemnis, and one opera, Fidelio. Together with Mozart and Haydn, he was part of the First Viennese School. Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of the Holy Roman Empire, Beethoven displayed his musical talents at an early age and was taught by his father Johann van Beethoven and by composer and conductor Christian Gottlob Neefe. At the age of 21 he moved to Vienna, where he began studying composition with Joseph Haydn, and gained a reputation as a virtuoso pianist. He lived in Vienna until his death. By his late 20s his hearing began to deteriorate, and by the last decade of his life he was almost totally deaf. In 1811 he gave up conducting and performing in public but continued to compose; many of his most admired works come from these last 15 years of his life.

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Erwin Schulhoff

Erwin Schulhoff is amongst the composers who have fallen into oblivion, and yet played an important role in the history of music. Dvorak already noticed him when he was a young boy, because of his musical talent and interest in everything new.
Schulhoff was one of the first European composers to find inspiration in jazz. He mainly made use of harmonic and rhythmic elements and dances like the foxtrot, charleston and shimmy. After the First World War, he also embraced the influence of Dadaism and composed a few pieces with absurd elements, such as In futurum, which consists entirely of rests.
In the 1930s, Schulhoff became a sympathizer of communism under influence of his friends, as a result of which he was not permitted to perform in Germany. Due to his Jewish descent and radical politic interests his music became labeled as ‘Entartete Musik’. His communist sympathies also brought him trouble in Czechoslovakia, were he had to work under a pseudonym after the invasion of the Nazis. In 1941, the Soviet Union approved his petition for citizenship, but he was arrested and deported to a concentration camp before he could leave Czechoslovakia.
Schulhoff was admired by his acquaintances, and recognized as a promising, gifted talent. As a pianist he was known as a virtuoso with brilliant technique and a strong touch.

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