Schulhoff: Duo for violin & cello

After World War I Schoenberg was prominently placed, together with Stravinsky, Bartok and Hindemith. Krenek and Weill were beckoning, whilst Les Six suffered for their irony in Paris. Quite different was the perspective for composer Erwin Schulhoff returning home from the war. At 24 years of age, he had been wounded twice on the front and experienced human suffering, destruction and the loss of own ideals. Schulhoff had to scratch a living doing musical odd jobs but became friends with George Grosz, Otto Dix along with the Berlin Dada movement, whilst programming the Second Viennese school in his Dresden concerts. In the Nazi era he was denied employment and politically he leaned to the left, even setting passages from the Communist Manifesto, later obtaining Soviet citizenship. However, he was arrested in Prague the day after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. In 1944, he died in the Wülzburg concentration camp in Germany and it was to take more than 40 years for his work to become known and more popular, enhanced by the efforts of Michael Haas and Decca's Entartete music series.

The Vogler Quartet celebrated their 25th anniversary in 2010/11. Here they offer Schulhoff's chamber music from the mid 1920s.

On this CD the father and daughter combination of cellist Dmitry and violinist Liza Ferschtman perform three major pieces from the 20th century. The featured works are duos by Kodaly, Ravel, and Schulhoff.

Violinist Liza Ferschtman released her debut recording for Challenge Classics in 2007 with music for violin and piano by Beethoven and Schubert (CC72174), and this was was followed in early 2010 by a disc devoted to the solo violin music of Bach and Ysayë (CC72351). In 2010 she made a critically acclaimed recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the Netherlands Philharmonic and conductor Jan Willem de Vriend (CC72384).

Liza Ferschtman’s father The Russian-born cellist Dmitry Ferschtman co-founded the Glinka String Quartet which toured the Soviet Union, Europe and the United States for twenty three years. All through his career Ferschtman has been an active chamber-music player, performing at many international festivals with artists such as Gidon Kremer, Mark Kaplan, Leonidas Kavakos, Boris Berman and Nobuko Imai.

Works for violin and cello are rare, but in the aftermath of World War I, a few rare composers rose brilliantly to the challenges posed by such a sparse ensemble. The four works on this CD are outstanding achievements in an era where classical music teetered between tradition and modernity.

The repertoire for unaccompanied violin and cello, if not large, has always been distinguished, as this important new album demonstrates with important compositions from the 20th-century alongside recent works from the 21st, supremely played by the highly-acclaimed Duo Zappa. Here, we present the Eight Pieces by the Russian Reinhold Gliere, best known for his Ilya Mourometz Symphony and The Red Poppy ballet. These impressively colourful Pieces date from 1909. Erwin Schulhoff, a superb composer and pianist, was born in Prague in 1894. After an important musical and political career he was interned in the Wulzburg concentration camp where he died in August 1942. His Duo of 1925 forms a fascinating correlation between Debussy and Schoenberg in a purely personal idiom.

The two works by contemporary Swiss composers Martin Wettstein and Massimiliano Matesic were written in 2004 for the Duo Zappa. They are the most important recent contributions to the repertoire and receive outstanding performances, in superb sound. The final work is a fascinating transcription of a Passacaglia in G minor by Handel by Johann Halvorsen, nephew by marriage of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, concluding this outstanding new CD which Guild presents with pride.