Block
Piano Trio No. 2; String Quartet etc
ARC Ensemble
Chandos CHAN 20358 70:54 mins
Born in 1899 into a prosperous Viennese Jewish family, Frederick Block was one of many hugely talented Austrian musicians whose careers suffered as a result of the Anschluss. A composition pupil of Hans Gál, he forged a growing reputation in his native country until being forced to emigrate to the United States in the late 1930s. Managing to scrape a meagre living in New York by making piano transcriptions of works by other composers, Block nonetheless continued to write prolific amounts of concert music before his premature death in 1945.
- Jewish composers suppressed by the Nazis...
- How the persecuted Jewish community made music in the Terezin ghetto
In his excellent booklet notes, Simon Wynberg classifies Block as an unashamedly conservative composer whose outlook was out of step with the modernist aesthetic of the Second Viennese School. Yet I feel that this categorisation doesn’t tell the full story. True, there are some moments of Viennese nostalgia with gorgeously lush harmonies in the piano chamber works that are reminiscent of Korngold. But Block’s work is never one-dimensional, since passionately Romantic expression often gives way to leaner textures, a more angular melodic line and a sardonic wit that place him closer to the soundworld of Poulenc. Good examples are the unexpectedly jazzy syncopations of the Second Piano Trios’s second movement and the concisely argued Suite for Clarinet and Piano.
Although it may be helpful to place Block’s music in some kind of historical perspective, there is little doubt that he was an extremely fluent composer with a strong personal identity whose cause is brilliantly served here by outstandingly committed playing from the ARC Ensemble and a superbly vivid recording. Erik Levi
