Dutch composer Dick Kattenburg barely got started before the curtain came down. In hiding from Nazi authorities in Utrecht, Kattenburg was probably arrested in a movie theater and shipped out to Auschwitz in May 1944. By late September, Kattenburg was dead at age 24. His music manuscripts — constituting about 2 dozen pieces written between 1936 and 1944 — wound up in the care of Kattenburg’s sister Daisy, who managed to survive World War II. The one piece that Kattenburg circulated outside of his own collection, his Flute Sonata (1937) was given to its dedicatee, flautist Ima Spanjaard-van Esso. Although Esso never played the piece, she presented its manuscript to Eleanore Pameijer, founder of the Leo Smit Foundation in Amsterdam, who began to play it — a lot — in the early 2000s. Word of these performances reached the daughter of Daisy Kattenburg, who discovered the rest of Dick Kattenburg’s compositions in the family attic where her mother had left them.
Hugaraton’s release In memoriam: Hungarian Composers Victims of the Holocaust pays tribute to the fellow travelers of the Sir Georg Soltis and Bela Bartóks — students, friends and other associates — who fell during the Holocaust. Not one of the composers featured on the disc — performed by an ad hoc group of expert Hungarian soloists, including renowned violinist Vilmos Szabadi — represents a name remotely familiar even to expert listeners. Of course, no composer — indeed, no person — makes plans to enter the gaping jaws of history’s periodic and unthinking purgations of innocent people, and one of the most interesting aspects of collections like this one is the opportunity to know music of composers we might otherwise never hear from, even if the styles don’t quite match up.
Have you ever wondered what Peter Tchaikovsky’s speaking voice sounded like? What about the piano playing of prominent Russian composers such as Sergey Taneyev (who died in 1915) or Anton Arensky (died 1906)? How about Arensky playing his famous Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 32, with the string players that premiered it with him? By now you might be wondering if we also have a bridge we’d like to sell you — but it’s true. Such recordings DO exist and have been collected by ace transfer engineer and preservationist Ward Marston on Marston’s The Dawn of Recording.
The Dawn of Recording contains a generous selection from the earliest surviving collection of classical music recordings, made by Russian businessman and phonographic hobbyist Julius Block. Block’s circle included some of the most important musicians in late 19th century Russia — Taneyev, Arensky, young pianist Josef Hofmann, novelist Leo Tolstoy, and even Peter Tchaikovsky. In the wake of Block’s death in 1934, parts of the collection was dispersed and lost, and some believed its very existence no more than a rumor. In the early 1990s, eight Block cylinders were purchased by a private collector at auction, and subsequent research uncovered a large part of the collection — more than 350 cylinders — in Russia in 2002, where it had been taken during World War II after being removed from the Berlin Phonogrammarchiv.
Marston has worked out a three disc program for The Dawn of Recording: The Julius Block Cylinders, consisting of 95 selections chosen on the basis of importance and sound quality. And in some cases the sound quality truly is surprising. The piano of Taneyev, while tinkly, rises out of the wax in Mozart’sFantasie in C minor, K. 475, with perfect clarity and every note audible. A couple of the Josef Hofmann items come booming out of the wax with confidence and surprisingly little noise. There is a small handful of items in this collection which reproduce with that kind of fidelity. Some others are either faint, besmirched with the telltale swish of a warped, damaged, or moldy cylinder or the notorious “horses hooves” of a cylinder riddled with cracks. If you’ve listened to a lot of cylinders, you know to put on different ears and listen through the noise. Those who venture forth can listen to extensive selections from pianist and composer Paul Pabst, a Liszt student who died in 1897, not to mention Tchaikovsky’s speaking voice, captured along with that of Anton Rubinstein in 1890. Tchaikovsky whistles a short passage, so at least we get a little music from him; cylinders made of his piano playing were duly noted in Block’s register, but have yet to be located.
One cannot fail to be amazed at the window some of this material opens on this epoch in Western culture, long obliterated by war and as distant a musical experience from our time as one can imagine. Marston’s The Dawn of Recording seems haunted by Tchaikovsky’s ghost. This is what’s left of the world in which he lived, and it’s as close as we can come to it until we develop a way to travel backwards through time.
When AMG published the third installment of “Eggheads in the Land of Jazz” — a continuing series on the history of jazz/classical crossover artists — one figure profiled there could only be sketched in. Of British composer, pianist and bandleader Reginald Foresythe (1907-1958) we had no photo, no sample recordings of his own group, and did not know his death date. We muddled through for the sake of the article, but as these things go it was only a matter of waiting until later in the year to have the answers to all those questions and more with the release on Dutch label BVHaast of The New Music of Reginald Foresythe. While it is not a complete survey of Foresythe’s recordings, it covers the essentials of his small recorded output and contrasts it with the numerous recordings other artists — such as Louis Armstrong,Earl Hines,Adrian Rollini,Paul Whiteman, and Fats Waller — made of Foresythe’s compositions.
Famous for opposing the bloated forms of late Romanticism, and notorious for describing the works of contemporary British pastoral composers as “cowpat music,” Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983) was one of the first English composers to adopt rigorous serial methods and join the international avant-garde. Even though her career did not take off until after World War II, Lutyens had planned to be a composer since the age of nine. Her determination carried her through study in France and a teaching position at the Royal College of Music in London, until success came in 1947 with her commissioned setting of Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, O Saisons, O Châteaux. While she had setbacks — she was obliged to compose for television and horror films, and she rented out rooms to support her family — Lutyens eventually found an audience for her lean, angular music and earned the nickname “12-Note Lizzie” from the conservative classical establishment.
Below is a small selection of Lutyens’ adventurous music, to have a taste of her work before deciding to binge.
Born on the 50th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth , Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga y Balzola (1806-1826) was actually known as the “Spanish Mozart” for early displays of his prodigious musical talents. But his reputation fell into decline after his premature death, just ten days before he would have turned 20 years old. Yet despite his short life and small output, Arriaga left enough of an impression that his cause was taken up in the late 19th century and his music has had periodic revivals ever since. Part of the attraction of Arriaga’s tragically short life and career involves speculation over what he might have accomplished, had he the time to mature. Certainly, we know less of Arriaga’s potential directions than of Mozart’s, who achieved total mastery over his art, whereas Arriaga had just emerged from the Paris Conservatoire and was still developing his style. In any event, his elegant music holds attractions sufficient to please casual listeners and rigorous critics alike; and though his music strongly resembles the styles of Mozart, Franz Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven, and at times even anticipates Franz Schubert, there is a unique and youthful voice in Arriaga’s works that has considerable power to charm and move.
One of the members of the famed Les Six,Georges Auric (1899-1983) never achieved a reputation equal to those of his compatriots and fellow composers Francis Poulenc,Darius Milhaud, or Arthur Honegger, yet he always seemed to be lumped with Louis Durey and Germaine Tailleferre, less fortunate colleagues who are usually overlooked and almost completely forgotten but for a few works. Yet Auric’s standing has improved steadily over the years, thanks to growing attention to his film music. The composer of lavish scores for such films as La Belle et le bête (1946), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), Moulin Rouge (1952), and The Innocents (1961), Auric has at last come into his own through some highly regarded all-digital recordings that restore his music to better sound and wider distribution than ever before.
Though next to nothing is known of the life of Martin Codax (fl. early 13th century), we have six attributed Portuguese-Galician poems set to music, and a seventh whose music is missing, in a collection called Cantigas de Amigo. (The parchment manuscript was accidentally discovered by the antiquarian bookseller Pedro Vindel in Madrid, lining a copy of a book by Cicero.) Of course, this is scant material from which to deduce any facts of a life, but that doesn’t stop the speculation. Because the songs of the Cantigas de Amigo are about love, it may be reasonable to assume that Codax (also known as Martim Codaz) was a composer at a Medieval court, possibly that of Ferdinand III, the Spanish king of Castille and León. Codax may also have been a Galician troubador.
In any event, the music speaks for itself, and the suave performances by Ensemble Alcatraz are among the most sensitive and attuned to the period. So for this diminutive body of work, this is Binge Listening at its finest and most selective.
Dutch composer Dick Kattenburg barely got started before the curtain came down. In hiding from Nazi authorities in Utrecht, Kattenburg was probably arrested in a movie theater and shipped out to Auschwitz in May 1944. By late September, Kattenburg was dead at age 24. His music manuscripts — constituting about 2 dozen pieces written between 1936 and 1944 — wound up in the care of Kattenburg’s sister Daisy, who managed to survive World War II. The one piece that Kattenburg circulated outside of his own collection, his Flute Sonata (1937) was given to its dedicatee, flautist Ima Spanjaard-van Esso. Although Esso never played the piece, she presented its manuscript to Eleanore Pameijer, founder of the Leo Smit Foundation in Amsterdam, who began to play it — a lot — in the early 2000s. Word of these performances reached the daughter of Daisy Kattenburg, who discovered the rest of Dick Kattenburg’s compositions in the family attic where her mother had left them.
One cannot fail to be amazed at the window some of this material opens on this epoch in Western culture, long obliterated by war and as distant a musical experience from our time as one can imagine. Marston’s The Dawn of Recording seems haunted by Tchaikovsky’s ghost. This is what’s left of the world in which he lived, and it’s as close as we can come to it until we develop a way to travel backwards through time.
One of the members of the famed 
Though next to nothing is known of the life of 
