Eisler: Vier Ernste Gesange; Piano Sonata Op 1 etc – review

5 / 5 stars
Goerne/Larcher/Ensemble Resonanz
(Harmonia Mundi)
Matthias Goerne
Beautifully shaded … Matthias Goerne PR

Matthias Goerne has recorded songs by Hanns Eisler before. In 1998, near the start of his association with Decca, the baritone released a fine recording of the complete Hollywood Songbook, and he repeats 17 of those 50 settings here. But the real interest of the new disc is Goerne's performance, beautifully shaded and articulated, of Eisler's very last work, the Ernste Gesänge, for baritone and string orchestra.

These wonderful, sombre songs were begun in 1961 and completed the following year, a few weeks before Eisler's death. They were composed in the wake of the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist party, at which Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Stalin and the atrocities under his regime. Those revelations had dealt the final shattering blow to Eisler's political idealism, and the songs, very much conceived as a final musical testament, are permeated with a sense of loss and regret. The texts come from a variety of poets, but, significantly, Brecht, who had supplied the words for so many of Eisler's songs, is not among them, and instead it is the poems of Hölderlin that figure most prominently. And while the vocal writing has the aching lyrical intensity that makes Eisler one of the 20th-century's greatest song composers, the accompaniments sometimes hark back to the expressionism of his earliest works, composed when he was studying with Schoenberg.

This is reinforced by the other work on this disc, the Piano Sonata that Eisler composed in 1922 and 1923, near the end of his studies with Schoenberg, and which he thought enough of to label as his Op 1. It is dedicated to his teacher, and some passages in it inhabit the same freely atonal world as Schoenberg's own Op 11 piano pieces, while other passages have a more ambiguous relationship to tonality, rather like early Berg. The sonata is played with careful attention to detail by Thomas Larcher, who also accompanies Goerne in the Hollywood songs. It is a fascinating and hugely rewarding disc.