...forthcoming from cpo:
https://www.jpc.de/jpcng/cpo/detail/-/art/felix-draeseke-streichquartett-nr-3/hnum/9735536
Coupling: Szene Op.69 for violin & piano; Suite Op.86 for 2 violins.
Looking forward to. Don't know the suite, but I like the other two works very much.
Ah, excellent! Thanks, Alan. I was wondering if/when this would be available, having got the 1st and 2nd SQs. Don't know any of the works, so also looking forward to hearing them.
SQ3 is a 'difficult' piece requiring a considerable amount of effort on the part of the listener. Something to get your teeth into...
I've only heard the 3rd quartet because (1) midis (2) Matesic's recording. I think there is a recording on YouTube too but I haven't listened to it yet...
This is, it seems, the 2nd recording of the Szene on cpo and, to my knowledge, its third commercial recording.
(The promotionals say that this is the only work by Draeseke in work-sized sonata form to have 5 movements, which is true if one doesn't count divertimenti like Draeseke's serenade; they then go on to count Haydn's divertimenti. Not sure that makes sense. (They call those early works Haydn's divertimento-like quartets, but I'm not positive Haydn himself called them quartets any more than he called his earlier "piano trios" trios (he called them sonatas). Names attached by editors a century-plus later really shouldn't count...))
The performance of SQ3 is very fine. Dating from 1895, it's a typically tough work, very chromatic and stylistically about as far from the mainstream of chamber music writing of that period as one can get owing to its employment of 'endless melody' and a highly contrapuntal approach.
I confess that Draeseke has always been for me the greatest romantic-era unsung composer (although I know that he is a really tough nut to crack), and once again I find myself simply flabbergasted at the utter originality and mastery of this quartet. There's nothing like it in the entire literature.
The CD is reviewed somewhat uncomprehendingly (but ultimately appreciatively) in the December issue of Gramophone magazine - uncomprehendingly because the reviewer (Amy Blier-Carruthers) evidently didn't know who Draeseke was and hadn't previously heard anything quite like his music. Nevertheless, it obviously impressed her, so kudos to her for that!
https://www.ram.ac.uk/people/amy-blier-carruthers
I've never delved into FD's chamber works, so this will be a treat. CPO has become my favorite label, of late.
Be prepared for somthing really different from the 19th century mainstream. This is not Brahms - or anything like it.
On The Art Music Lounge another review was published. The author is Lynn René Bayley:
https://artmusiclounge.wordpress.com/2021/10/09/felix-draesekes-string-music/
The conclusion: "Clearly interesting music by a composer who deserves to be much better known, and the performances are excellent."
That's a very insightful review. To explain the difference between Draeseke and other composers of the more classical school, the writer says:
Those who have followed my blog know that one of the major complaints I have with older composers—not all of them, of course, but most of them—is that they wasted (in my view) a lot of time in their compositions creating and developing tunes that people could hum on their way out of the concert. Brahms only did this to a point, however—he was too serious and fastidious a composer to really waste a lot of time on melodies for the sake of melodies—and Draeseke did this even less, and this is probably why his music fell out of favor. What Merian so clearly and aptly described as his "somewhat standoffish" musical personality was undoubtedly based on the fact that Draeseke didn't waste time milking melodies, not even in the slow movements where they are clearly more prolonged. Moreover, these melodic lines are always, and I mean always, underpinned by that moving harmonic base, which doesn't quite leave the listener in the lurch but also doesn't coddle or pacify his or her need for something "safe" and unchanging in the lower lines.
I find this passage rather shocking in its elitism--in fact snobbery. One wonders for example who these "older" composers were who were "wasting time on melody" and "coddled" the public with "tunes they can hum on the way out". I suspect Dvorak tops the list.
I read the whole review before posting here and there are good things in it. But this passage is just as arrogant if read in context as it appears on its own.
Arrogant indeed. It reads like something any Director of BBC Radio 3 could have said anytime between the 1980s and the 2010s.
I think the writer could have avoided the unnecessary comparison with 'composers who wrote tunes' by simply emphasising Draeseke's preference for contrapuntal development in his compositions. In any case, it's only true to a certain degree: for example, the first movement of SQ3 has a marvellous 'tune' that has been going round in my head for days, and SQ2 has another, even more glorious opening arching melody. I'd also mention here the sublime trio in the scherzo of Draeseke's 3rd Symphony. Draeseke could certainly knock them out when he was so minded.
There's also another flaw in his argument. Raff was one of the 19th century's greatest tunesmiths, yet his music fell out of favour too. The flow of musical history just isn't that neat...
What I did find interesting, though, was this comment:
these melodic lines are always, and I mean always, underpinned by that moving harmonic base, which doesn't quite leave the listener in the lurch but also doesn't coddle or pacify his or her need for something "safe" and unchanging in the lower lines.
In other words, Draeseke's music is rarely 'safe' harmonically speaking. That's what makes him pretty well unique among the mid-to-late 19thC composers of his generation, especially of chamber music.
Interestingly though the same 3rd quartet features a violation of this "principle" at the very beginning; at least to my ears the harmony there is quite "normal"; it is indeed the tuen that makes the passage memorable.
Great artists are hard to pigeonhole.
I was actually more bothered by the contempt for "less sophisticated" listeners that is woven into the passage without having any relevance to explaining this particular set of works. If somebody gets enjoyment out of a lovely tune (I do!) who is he to look down on them?
Quite. If it is a waste of time "creating and developing tunes that people could hum" that's Schubert (who found it difficult NOT to write a tune) condemned and kicked ignominiously onto the rubbish heap. Really, the utter tripe some supposedly intelligent people write!
This seems like an excellent place where I'd otherwise -expect- someone to say "back to the music".
Point taken, Eric.
It'd be interesting to hear from members who have heard the new CD...
From Edition Silvertrust:
Felix Draeseke. "Draeseke was a musician whose works, even in his lifetime, received far fewer performances than they deserved in view of their high artistic value. His Third String Quartet dates from 1899. The first movement, Andantino elegiaco, expresses sadness which is at times interrupted by stormy episodes. The second movement, Scherzo, allegro spumante, lives up to its title, while the trio, with its easy tunefulness, provides a soothing contrast. A very expressive slow movement, Adagio non tanto, which is tinged with melancholy comes next. Before the finale, Draeseke inserts a graceful Intermezzo. The finale, Allegro risoluto, begins in a powerful, almost harsh fashion, while the second theme is a lovely cantabile melody."
—The famous chamber music critic Wilhelm Altmann writing in his Chamber Music Handbook.
Felix Draeseke (1835-1913) was born in the German city of Coburg. He began composing at an early age and subsequently entered the famous Leipzig Conservatory where he studied composition with Julius Rietz and piano with Ignaz Moscheles. However, his musical outlook was shaped and influenced by the so-called New German School of which Liszt and Wagner were the leading proponents. He held a number of teaching positions in Switzerland and Germany, eventually settling in the city of Dresden and a few years later began teaching at the Dresden Conservatory. He wrote in nearly every genre and his works were frequently performed during his lifetime. Liszt was a champion of many of Draeseke's compositions and helped them gain publication.
https://www.earsense.org/chamber-music/Felix-Draeseke-String-Quartet-No-3-in-c-sharp-minor-Op-66/?ri=0&rq=q%3DFelix%2BDraeseke%252C%2B%26lid%3D-1%26p%3D1%26rc%3D17 (https://www.earsense.org/chamber-music/Felix-Draeseke-String-Quartet-No-3-in-c-sharp-minor-Op-66/?ri=0&rq=q%3DFelix%2BDraeseke%252C%2B%26lid%3D-1%26p%3D1%26rc%3D17)
I think this exceprt from the review in December Gramophone is worth copying here.
The arresting opening of the Third String Quartet immediately alerts us that something interesting is afoot, with a beguiling, wistful, songlike little melody that fragments fairly quickly and meanders down various paths. The Constanze Quartet offer some impressive and committed playing here, with shimmering textures, singing and soaring melodic lines, poignant pulsating heartbeats in the inner parts and an expressive use of vibrato, withholding or intensifying it in response to the moment at hand.
...the performers and production team have unarguably captured an expansive, luscious and very live soundscape, one full of energy and dedication that leaves us wanting to hear more.
Amy Blier-Carruthers
It pays to give something a second chance - or a fifth one. We used to have an active member who was bewildered when other members would say things along the lines of, "It took me a while to learn to enjoy a certain work," or "Such and such recording, which I initially dismissed, I have now returned to and enjoy far more." He said he formed all opinions of music on a single hearing and these opinions were permanent. All this talk of changing opinions of a performance or work he found unfathomable.
I have a pretty big giveaway pile that I don't actually give away. In it I long ago placed most of my Draeseke, with the exceptions of the piano concerto, the clarinet and cello sonatas, and the quintet for piano, horn, and strings. Something, though, made me go and pull out the string chamber music. Today I played through the first two string quartets and the two string quintets and now, though I had listened to all four works many times and given up on them, I suddenly find that I "get" them.
I guess sometimes you just have to try one more time after having let it sit for a while, in this case more than a year.
I never picked up the third quartet but now I definitely will.
Draeseke is like that. His music can be a tough nut to crack, but he's my personal favourite among the unsung. Much of my appreciation for the composer I owe to the late Dr Alan Krueck who taught me the virtue of persistence when listening. The only piece I don't 'get' is Christus, but that may have something to do with the only recording ever made...
That's very much the case with all five hours of Christus, I think. I don't pretend to have persevered with it as maybe I should, but both Alan Krueck, undoubtedly the doyen of Draeseke enthusiasts, and another (German) luminary of the Draeseke Society (whose name now escapes me) to whom I spoke about the recording many years ago now roundly condemned Udo Follert's recording as a lamentable missed opportunity, more likely to put off the curious than to convert them. They both regarded the work as potentially Draeseke's crowning achievement.
The 3rd String Quartet is the one I personally found hardest to like - until the cpo recording came along which, I note, jpc are now discounting:
https://www.jpc.de/jpcng/cpo/detail/-/art/felix-draeseke-streichquartett-nr-3/hnum/9735536
Here's an insightful comment from musicologist Hans Merian:
<<Draeseke is, along with Brahms, one of the most important composers of chamber music. He is a thoroughly unique individual, reserved, severe, even almost somewhat standoffish on a first impression, but [with] a genuine artist's disposition that absorbs itself with its whole person in its own works and even becomes engrossed in them with a certain pensive tenacity. One has to hear him repeatedly and occupy oneself more thoroughly with him in order to appreciate him in full.>>
https://artmusiclounge.wordpress.com/2021/10/09/felix-draesekes-string-music/