Following their much-acclaimed coupling of chamber music by Gideon Klein and Viktor Ullmann for Channel Classics (12/91), the Hawthorne Quartet and friends have come up with a further disc devoted to music composed by victims of the Holocaust. The change of label has brought some inappropriate design innovations—the use of barbed wire as a decorative motif throughout the booklet seems peculiarly illadvised—but the standards of performance and recording remain exceptionally high. The project has again been overseen by the violist Mark Ludwig, who is also Director of the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation.
Although two out of the three Schulhoff works are available in concert performances taped at Gidon Kremer's Lockenhaus Festival (String Quartet No. 1 and the Concertino—Philips (CD) 434 038-2PH), the Boston-based team are on their best form and have the advantage of superior studio sound—natural, ripe and full, though possibly more resonant than some will like. None of the Schulhoff works is quite as challenging as the String Sextet (recorded by several groups, including the Raphael Ensemble for Hyperion, 7/92), but the String Quartet No. 1 and Concertino in particular scarcely deserve their current neglect. In these works, the influence of Mahler and Schoenberg is sometimes less apparent than affinities with Martinu, Roussel and Les Six. The composer studied with Debussy as well as Reger and, like a number of post-Janacek Czech composers, seems to have been drawn to an extraordinary diversity of styles. Schulhoff's love of jazz is well known, yet he is also prone to an open-air, modal folkiness which makes the first movement of the quartet sound a little like Warlock! The Concertino's unlikely combination of instruments imparts a ghostly resonance to its offbeat—sometimes Stravinskyan, sometimes Mahlerian—material.
Kapralova's Suite is rather more predictable in style, and it is the unfinished Duo by the immensely gifted student composer Gideon Klein which really strikes sparks. Here, the influences of Schoenberg and Janacek have been fashioned into a consistent idiom, emotionally potent and technically assured. The music breaks off at the point at which Klein was transported to the Theresienstadt ghetto camp; there he managed to complete a handful of additional pieces before his removal to Auschwitz and subsequent murder. Klein's music deserves the widest audience and the Hawthorne Quartet intend to explore further scores.'