Distler, H.: Piano Music (Hugo Distler)

Albumbeschreibung

Short-lived German composer Hugo Distler, best known for his organ and choral music, did produce a considerable amount of music for keyboard not explicitly for the organ. Most of it has never been published, and there is a concerted effort underway to get out a critical edition of it. To meet the deadline of Distler's centenary and make some amount of the piano music available, Musicaphon issued Hugo Distler: Piano Works, likely the first recording ever made of Distler's music on the piano. Musicaphon's choice of pianist is Annette Töpel, who teaches at the Kassel Academy of Music and hails, like Distler himself, from Lübeck. Alas, Töpel -- whose previous outings on disc have centered on early German romantic literature -- isn't the most sympathetic interpreter for Distler's keyboard music. Some of these were intended as simple teaching pieces, and Töpel plays the music with a strict, rather teacherly attention to markings and a pedagogical, non-legato approach to Distler's oblong sense of phrasing; it's like what Glenn Gould's Bach playing is like when it's at its most obstreperously intellectual. Distler was rare in the 1930s as an enthusiastic proponent of the harpsichord, one of the main classical keyboard instruments in the twenty first century, but in Distler's time, a museum instrument that hardly anyone was playing. A fair number of things here were obviously designed for use on harpsichord given their limited compass and proclivity toward long trills, sticky repeated notes, and other devices ideal for the harpsichord. The very title of Distler's Op. 18 set, 30 Spielstücke für due Kleinorgel oder andere Tasteninstrumente, is straining against the use of that un-commercial word: cembalo. Töpel plays these pieces as though she were playing the harpsichord on a Steinway, with a halting, uncertain sense of touch that is certainly unlovely. There is a certain desperation to hear Distler's keyboard music away from the organ that anything will do. But in the case of Musicaphon's Hugo Distler: Piano Works it's almost better to wait until someone who loves this music can have a crack at it, or can play it on the harpsichord where it belongs. That said, this will not be the first time a performer out of sympathy recorded his music; take for example Cantate's choice of Arno Schönstedt, who dutifully recorded all of the organ music while seeming to personally hate it. In such light, one can say that Musicaphon's Hugo Distler: Piano Works is at least par for the course.
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