Grosz Achtung, Aufnahme!!; plus works by Goehr and Seiber Lilia Milek (soprano), André Post (tenor) et al; Ebony Band/Werner Herbers; Cappella Amsterdam/Daniel Reuss Channel Classics CCS46823 68:39 mins
This is music from Germany before the Nazis put Modernism to the torch, with Walter Goehr latterly a serial serialist embracing the tango and Mátyás Seiber, a pupil of Kodály, dancing a Charleston. Even livelier is Wilhelm Grosz’s one-act opera Achtung, Aufnahme!!
It’s a movie opera reminding us how important the cinema was in the cultural life of the Weimar republic. Grosz and his librettist Béla Balázs, who wrote the text for Bartók’s Bluebeard, plot a shooting in the middle of the filming of a melodrama. The student interloper with the revolver, creeping on set to murder the actress who has jilted him, is so convincing that he is awarded a Hollywood-style contract. ‘With real pain you can earn a lot here,’ says the imperious movie director. The music is jazzy and syncopated, popular and everyday, more nightclub than concert hall and a cousin of Weill’s scores for Brecht. And with at least two sinuous tangos it’s a delight.
Werner Herbers, the principal oboist with the Concertgebouw Orchestra who died in June, conducts his Dutch ensemble The Ebony Band in a project that was clearly close to his heart as well as his head. The two compilations of music by Walter Goehr and Mátyás Seiber from the revue Komödien in Europa and a radio play, Die vertauschten Manuskripte are equally surprising, hinting at a jazz-mad generation besotted with the saxophone. For once the musical past is less of another country.
Christopher Cook