Goldschmidt & Reizenstein : Cello Concertos

Album review

Born in 1911 and 1903 respectively, these German composers – who were, unfortunately for them, born Jewish – Franz Reizenstein and Berthold Goldschmidt were exiled from Germany in 1934 and 1935, but their stories were very different. From 1932 Goldschmidt had made a serious name for himself following the performance of one of his operas in Mannheim. But he was already 29 and had some serious musical and social baggage behind him, not only in the form of a job assisting Erich Kleiber at the Berlin production of Wozzeck. So when he came to Britain, he was already well-regarded. But the unfortunate Reizenstein was only 21 when he came to London, where he wanted to continue the studies he had started with Hindemith in Berlin... Happily for him, he found a space under the benevolent wing of Vaughan Williams, and eventually took English nationality and even became a teacher in the Royal College of Music. As for Goldschmidt, who was already famous and whose opera The Magnificent Cuckold was to have been first performed in 1933 – an ill-fated year – he found himself classed as a "degenerate artist", which prompted his departure shortly after. Neither of the two composers would give into the atonal, serialist Schönbergian torrent, let alone the post-war avant-garde: and so their music was soon thought of as old hat... Goldschmidt even quit composing in 1958, and didn't return to it until the end of his life, once the serialist dictatorship had fallen amid much derision. The two cello concertos supplied here by the great Raphael Wallfisch were written and performed in the 1950s, and then largely forgotten for decades, in spite of the support of the equally-great Feuermann. Here, we find a language which is at once classical and modern, in the tradition of Hindemith and Vaughan Williams, and surely Shostakovitch too – these are works that richly deserve a rediscovery. Unlike the Reizenstein concerto, the Goldschmidt one is not a world premiere. © SM/Qobuz