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Chandos3
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CPO3
If you are about to step into a warm bath, put one of these on the player and submerse your January body in a fantasy world that never changes.
What Hahn and Gal have in common, other than a one-syllable name, is a reluctance ever to be tempted beyond the musical language they were born into youth.
Hahn, Venezuelan-born lover of Marcel Proust, composes remembrances of those lost times before the First World War. The string quartet and piano quintet on this album, each composed directly after a world war, might easily be mistaken for Fauré or Saint Saens, masquerading as Vinteuil in Proust’s monumental novel. Lovely melodies flutter and flicker. The pleasure is instant and elegant, and just as swiftly forgotten. Hahn’s songs are even lovelier, conjuring an age of leisure, of two-hour lunches and love in the afternoon. The accomplished performers are members of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective; the tenor is Karim Sulayman. What’s not to like?
Hans Gal, an Austrian refugee, settled in Edinburgh and lived to the age of 97. Gal’s sound world is that of Dvorak and Brahms. A 1936 Serenade for String Orchestra gives no hint of current anxieties, wandering through the Vienna Woods without a care in the world. A 1939 concertino for violin and string orchestra is showy and slow, a salon piece for Sunday afternoons.
Two decades later, in Music for String Orchestra of 1957, Gal’s language has moved no further forward. If the disc hadn’t carried his name, I might have mistaken this piece for something by Serenanden-Fuchs, the Viennese professor who took coffee with Brahms and taught the teenaged Gustav Mahler. It’s all wonderfully written, perfectly made, completely out of time. The Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, conductor Jan Söderblom, play this music with dreamy relish. There is no law (yet) against pleasure.
