The reappraisal of the music of Ernst Krenek continues apace, now reaching his largest symphony, the Second, which dates from early 1923. Running to a little under an hour, it is pretty much what one might expect of an expansive work from a young man not yet 23, bursting with ability and eager to provoke (especially his cautiously modernist teacher, Franz Schreker). Every musical ‘-ism’ and ‘-ality’ known to man is present, crammed in uncritical and often undigested form within a rambling, kaleidoscopic sequence of three large-scale movements, all of which cover sufficient ground to almost be considered a symphony in their own right. As a technical exercise it is quite impressive in the way the whole almost works, but expressively the music seems to have not the faintest idea where it is going, has been or, indeed, started out from.
Even approached as a symphony about the problem of writing a symphony in the 1920s, its conclusion is dismal, as the culmination is an empty anticipation (by some dozen years) of ‘Shostakovich bombast’, but without the illustrative purpose evident in many of the Russian’s compositions. I do not know if Krenek’s Second Symphony was ever played in Russia, but one can hear in it a possible model for Shostakovich’s equally enormous Fourth Symphony, which shares a similar design, pseudo-Mahlerian atmosphere and profligacy of idiom with that of Krenek. The difference between the two works is that Shostakovich’s sounds as if driven by an expressive imperative of a sort quite lacking in Krenek’s. Still, it’s a fascinating document of the time, given here in a really fine, hell-for-leather performance.
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