This first extended survey of the piano music of Ernst Krenek (1900-92) continues with a range of works showing his craftsmanship and imagination - and humor. The early Toccata and Chaconne, Op. 13, has it's origins in a joke intended to pull the legs of musicologists and music critics, but it develops into a massive contrapuntal essay of astonishing ambit. Krenek's treatment of Baroque and contemporary dances in the three early suites reveal a fondness for learned whimsy - and that wry dispassion informs even the elegiac and brittle Fifth Sonata, written a quarter-century later in American exile. The closing Sechs Vermessene are kaleidoscopic miniatures with an improvised quality, as if advanced musical modernism were meeting the freest of free jazz.
This first extended survey of the piano music of Ernst Krenek (1900-92) continues with a range of works showing his craftsmanship and imagination - and humor. The early Toccata and Chaconne, Op. 13, has it's origins in a joke intended to pull the legs of musicologists and music critics, but it develops into a massive contrapuntal essay of astonishing ambit. Krenek's treatment of Baroque and contemporary dances in the three early suites reveal a fondness for learned whimsy - and that wry dispassion informs even the elegiac and brittle Fifth Sonata, written a quarter-century later in American exile. The closing Sechs Vermessene are kaleidoscopic miniatures with an improvised quality, as if advanced musical modernism were meeting the freest of free jazz.
This first extended survey of the piano music of Ernst Krenek (1900-92) continues with a range of works showing his craftsmanship and imagination - and humor. The early Toccata and Chaconne, Op. 13, has it's origins in a joke intended to pull the legs of musicologists and music critics, but it develops into a massive contrapuntal essay of astonishing ambit. Krenek's treatment of Baroque and contemporary dances in the three early suites reveal a fondness for learned whimsy - and that wry dispassion informs even the elegiac and brittle Fifth Sonata, written a quarter-century later in American exile. The closing Sechs Vermessene are kaleidoscopic miniatures with an improvised quality, as if advanced musical modernism were meeting the freest of free jazz.
