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Martinů Memorial to Lidice, Klein Partita for Strings, Bartók Concerto for Orchestra.
Philadelphia Orchestra, cond. Christoph Eschenbach. Ondine ODE 1072-5 (68:52)
Reviewed by Martin Anderson
posted 19 March 2006

Once upon a time, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra was the only one of these three works to enjoy any kind of popularity. The fact that Christoph Eschenbach and The Philadelphia Orchestra should choose a programme of three composers whose careers were blighted by the Nazis as their first collaboration with the Finnish label Ondine – thus ending a ten-year-long CD silence – is indicative of how far such once-marginal repertoire has moved to the centre-stage. Eschenbach explains the importance of the programme in an introduction in the booklet:

In May 2005, in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of one of the most horrific wars in history and in memory of, and in reverence to, three composers who were directly or indirectly affected by fascism and the Holocaust, we recorded our program in Philadelphia live for this CD.

The third movement of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, Martinů’s Memorial to Lidice, and the second movement of Klein’s Partita are elegies mourning the fate of humanity and of the history of humankind. Each of them seeks, and finds – or fails to find – the solace needed to heal the wounds.

At the same time, each of the composers proclaims almost euphorically the principle of hope, which moves us and which we take up in order to pass on, as a warning against evil and for peace in the world.

Musicians often make grandiose and woolly statements about the ability of music to bring peace and promote understanding; since Eschenbach ended the Second World War an orphan, abandoned in a camp, his words must carry an unusual degree of sincerity.

All three works were written in 1943–44, Martinů’s Memorial to Lidice in August 1943 as a embittered protest against the massacre, in June the previous year, of the menfolk of the Czech village of Lidice in a reprisal against the assassination of Reinnard Heydrich; the women and children were shipped off to camps and the buildings razed to the ground. But the prevailing spirit of Martinů’s moving score is one of sadness, of consolation: he is shaking not his fist in fury but his head, in sorrowful disbelief.

Gideon Klein (1919–45) was the youngest, and perhaps the most gifted, of all the composers interned in Terezín and subsequently hauled off to Auschwitz, whence he was forced into slave labour in a coal mine in Fürstengrube, near Katovice; it is there he is presumed to have been killed, in January 1945. His String Trio, written only nine days before he was transported to his death, has become the best-known of his tragically short worklist, not least because of Vojtěch Saudek’s 1990 arrangement for strings, allowing Klein’s music at last into the orchestral repertoire. The fast outer two movements, each only three minutes or so apiece, buttress a larger (ten-minute) set of variations on a Moravian folksong. Klein must have been aware of the fate that probably awaited him: heard in that perspective, the energy, vigour and sheer lack of sentimentality in his Trio almost beggar belief, and the work becomes testament to unalloyed human courage.

In the company of these two Czechs, one exiled, the other murdered, Bartók may appear the odd man out But his self-imposed exile in the USA was itself a form of protest; indeed, when the Nazi exhibition of ‘Entartete Musik’ opened in Düsseldorf in 1938, he objected that his music was not among the works that were banned.

Glittering, high-octane performances from the Philadelphia Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach, in good sound. Sympathetic notes from Christopher H. Gibbs. A most auspicious start to this new collaboration.

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