Neukomm: Chamber Works – Kammerensemble Classic der Deutschen

Somewhere in the archives of musical footnotes there ought to be an entry for the man who traveled more than almost any composer of his era and left behind a body of work that sounds, disconcertingly, as though he never left the room. Sigismund Ritter von Neukomm studied with Haydn in Vienna, then took his lessons to St. Petersburg, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and points beyond. None of it, on the evidence of this new disc, troubled his musical language in the slightest.

The instrumentation is the story here, not the invention. Neukomm liked to build chamber pieces the way a collector arranges curiosities on a shelf: a Septuor concertant that mixes winds and strings in unexpected proportions, an Otteto that opens with a pomposity its material can’t sustain, a Notturno scored for forces that seem chosen more for novelty than necessity. You listen not for where the music is going but for who’s about to play next. That’s a kind of pleasure. It is not the pleasure of a Schubert octet or a Beethoven septet, works with which these pieces inevitably — and unfavorably — invite comparison.

The Kammerensemble Classic der Deutschen Oper Berlin deserves real credit. You can hear every strand of Neukomm’s often crowded textures: the bassoon poking up through the middle voices, the double bass given actual thematic business rather than mere harmonic filler. The trumpet, deployed sparingly and with a courtier’s tact, never barges. Someone in the control room understood how to record this repertoire — warm, present, unforced, with enough air around each instrument that the ear can do its sorting without strain.

The Nonetto that opens the program is probably the most successful piece here, if only because its parade of solos — flute, then clarinet, then viola, then bassoon, the trumpet held in reserve for a cadenza near the close — creates a structural interest that the actual thematic material doesn’t otherwise provide. It has the shape of a divertimento that wandered into a more ambitious genre by accident.

The Notturno, composed in 1817 in Rio de Janeiro of all unlikely places for a work so thoroughly saturated in Viennese convention, opens with a piano solo that gestures toward early Beethoven without ever risking Beethoven’s harmonic adventurousness. Imagine the piece premiered under tropical skies, thousands of miles from the salons that shaped its idiom, its composer apparently unmoved by the change of scenery. The Otteto that follows offers a genuinely fine cello solo buried inside an otherwise inflated introduction. I found myself wishing Neukomm had trusted that cellist with more real estate.

Only the Quintetto stirs real excitement, and only briefly. Its opening bars are rhythmically alive, faintly Iberian in flavor, the harp given prominence it rarely enjoys in chamber scoring of this period. For perhaps thirty seconds you think you’ve stumbled onto something genuinely personal. Then the music settles into an amiable tune that the annotator, with admirable honesty, points out is nearly identical to a theme by an earlier composer. The spark goes out as quickly as it flared.

Haydn taught Neukomm structure, proportion, and good manners. He could not teach him what cannot be taught: the instinct for the unexpected modulation, the melodic idea that surprises even its own creator. Rossini, arriving a generation later with far less contrapuntal schooling, understood instinctively how to startle an audience into delight. Neukomm never quite manages it. His music is genial company for about twenty minutes, agreeable furniture after that, and eventually — across six works and nearly an hour — a demonstration of how thoroughly charm can substitute for content without anyone appearing to notice, least of all the composer.

Recommended, with real enthusiasm, to specialists in the twilight of the Classical era and collectors of instrumental oddities. Everyone else should perhaps sample the Nonetto and stop there.