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Classical Spotlight from NetRadio
By Bill Parker
About a year ago I recommended another Cd (their first) by this same ensemble, and can do the same, even more enthusiastically, on this one. It is just as beautifully played, has an expanded and improved booklet, and offers some 20 minutes more music. Like its predecessor, it's a collection of mostly rare items for an instrumental combination seldom heard today -two violins and one double bass (and, actually, one violin plus double bass in the two pieces by Gregora, of whom more anon). It happens that this particular ensemble was at one time quite common in Vienna and environs, through the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was |
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played by musicians from Upper Austria known as "Linzer Geiger" (Fiddlers from Linz) who sailed up and down the Danube, alighting at various stops to play dance music, especially the scandalous new waltz which caused so much consternation among moralists when first introduced. The waltz quickly dominated the burgeoning dance halls of Vienna, crowding out the former favorites, the minuet, allemande, mazurka and so on.
The reason we don't hear more of this tiny type of ensemble today is that by the second quarter of the 19th century, composers had begun to formalize these dances into setpieces in response to the demand from increasingly bourgeois concert audiences (e.g. Chopin's mazurkas and waltzes), and though the waltz in particular lived on for many more decades as a living form, even it was soon organized into the large symphonic waltzes of the Strauss family, played by full orchestras. The three-piece ensemble began to seem hopelessly out of date, rather like a 12-inch black and whit television receiver next to a 32-inch color model. As the Vienna Waltz Ensemble easily proves, however, small can be just as good, if not better. These dances certainly sound svelte and charming played this way, and so naturally recorded.
As with the earlier album (Denwa Classical DC-101), familiar composers are mixed with the unfamiliar most intriguingly. Whereas Schubert, Rossini and Johann Strauss, Jr. led the earlier team, here we have Strauss, Sr., and Joseph Haydn, with Johann Nepomuk Hummel as shortstop. On the sidelines, but showing much sparkle and potential, we meet Ignaz Michael Pamer, who played for Beethoven and other habitues of The Golden Pear tavern in Vienna, reputedly quaffing an entire stein of beer after each piece; the aforementioned Frantisek Gregora, a Czech double bassist and author of a famous harmony textbook; Franz Alexander Possinger, a successful Viennese composer and violinist of his day who once was called as an expert witness in a dispute between Beethoven and his publisher; and everybody's old friend, "Anonymous," about who we know nothing.
Grace and elegance are the keywords for this CD, both in the charming music and the suave performances. This is "simple" music in the best sense-not stupid, just intelligently uncomplicated. Kudos to the Vienna Waltz Ensemble for their scholarship in uncovering such rarities and bringing them back to vivid life. |
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D E N W A Productions
Denny Nowak: President, Press & Radio Promotion
P.O. Box 34911 Chicago, IL 60634 773.777.1092
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