Tonya Lemoh joue Joseph Marx

Album review

Pianist Tonya Lemoh, of Australian and Sierra Leonean background, has worked in Germany and Denmark. This, her debut recording, unearths the music of an almost forgotten Austrian composer, Joseph Marx; it includes several world-premiere recordings, from scores provided to Lemoh by Marx's descendants. The music is a worthwhile find. Marx was a contemporary of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, and thanks to the conservatism of his music he was also their nemesis. In the post-World War II rush to embrace the music that fascism had attacked, Marx, who rode out the war as a music professor in Vienna, was forgotten. But his music, though conservative, was in no way derivative, and Lemoh gives us an intriguing sampling. Marx has been called a Romantic Impressionist, but that gives a mistaken impression; the sharp formal boundary lines in his music owe nothing to Debussy and his successors. What's superficially impressionistic about his music are the highly chromatic harmonies, but however dense they become they always have a goal in mind. A better comparison would be to say that these pieces resemble what might have happened if Brahms had somehow incorporated Reger's harmonic procedures into his music at the end of his life. A good place to start is with the "Prelude and Fugue," one of the Six Pieces for Piano of 1916 (this is divided into two separate tracks, with the result that the Six Pieces occupy seven tracks). It's a remarkable piece of work, combining an academic form with dense atmospherics and shifting rhythms in a uniquely lush mix that has none of Reger's forbidding quality. There is a sense of beauty in the four short premieres as well; Carneval carries forward the Romantic nocturne tradition in an unexpected way. The music doesn't sound like early Schoenberg or Webern, it doesn't sound like Brahms, and it doesn't sound like Reger. Lemoh gets its curious mixture of soberness and sensuality, and the result announces a significant new keyboard talent.

© TiVo

Details of original recording : 54:38 - DDD - Enregistré à la Salle de concert de l'Académie Royale de Musique à Aarhus au Danemark en juillet 2006 - Notes en anglais, allemand et français