Kornauth Piano Music, Volume 1 – Jonathan Powell

Some names drop through the cracks of musical history for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. Egon Kornauth is a case in point: a composer whose misfortune was to write well-crafted tonal music in the very years when Vienna’s avant-garde was busy inventing the twelve-tone system down the street.

Kornauth came out of Olomouc and made his way to Vienna to study, first with Robert Fuchs, then with Schreker, and, crucially, in private lessons with Franz Schmidt. It’s Schmidt’s imprint that lingers most audibly across this disc, not the chromaticism of Schreker or the perfume of Zemlinsky. Kornauth is a more classically minded creature: long-breathed, harmonically inquisitive but never anarchic, drawn to the piano’s capacity for grand, sonorous statement.

The Phantasie, op. 10, dating from 1915, opens the program. It’s the most structurally ambitious thing here, practically a one-movement sonata in disguise, its opening restlessness giving way to a second theme so plush and unabashedly vocal that you can almost hear Richard Strauss clearing his throat backstage. The piano writing owes something to Liszt’s grand manner: thick chords, wide spacing, the pedal doing serious interpretive work.

By the Three Piano Pieces, op. 23 — 1920 now, the war and empire both gone — something has changed. The first piece carries a funeral tread. The middle “Improvisation” is where Kornauth’s harmonic imagination is at its most alert: fluid, unpredictable, never merely fashionable in its dissonance. The closing waltz is a sly, unstable thing, forever changing its rhythmic footing so you lose track of whether you’re in triple time or something stranger.

The Little Suite, op. 29, from 1923, is the disc’s most purely charming stretch. Seven miniatures, over almost before they begin, each vividly drawn. Jonathan Powell’s booklet note points toward Joseph Marx as a kindred spirit here, and that warmth is audible in the amply spread chords and unhurried lyricism, though Mahler still hovers at the edges. There’s a lightness to this set that the later works can’t quite summon.

The Prelude and Passacaglia, op. 43 (1939), is bleaker company. The prelude works a restless seam between Bach and Chopin: one hears the contrapuntal bones of the Baroque under music that keeps wanting to melt into Romantic rubato. The passacaglia grows genuinely unsettling in places, its lighter textures never quite dispelling an undertow of dread, before Kornauth pulls off an ending of surprising, almost willed optimism — a fanfare, ascending lines, a gesture of hope that feels hard-won rather than automatic.

The Five Piano Pieces, op. 44, close the recital, compact and various, written in 1940 with the world already at war again. They don’t outstay their welcome. Nothing on this disc does; Kornauth had the instincts to know when a musical thought had said what it needed to say, and to stop.

Jonathan Powell, better known to some collectors for his explorations of Skryabin and the more esoteric corners of early twentieth-century Russian and Central European piano repertoire, plays this music as though he has lived inside it for years. These are premiere recordings, after all; someone has to hear the piece before anyone can decide how it should go. His tone is warm without curdling into sentimentality, and his voicing of Kornauth’s thick chordal textures is exemplary: nothing gets buried, no inner line goes missing even when both hands are working at full density. There is no rival release to weigh this against. This is repertoire that has waited a long time for its advocate, and Powell seems the right one to have arrived.

Should you buy it? Yes, not as a duty, but because the music repays the visit. Kornauth was no revolutionary. He was something rarer in his particular moment: a craftsman with something personal to say, working quietly while the century roared past him. This disc makes as persuasive a case for him as one could hope, and one waits for volume two with real curiosity, not mere completism.