Piano Duo Music by Hans Gál

There used to be a man at a bus stop on the south side of Edinburgh, humming to himself, entirely absorbed, and if you didn’t know who he was you’d have walked right past him. That was Hans Gál. I did not walk past him, not always — and I wish now I’d stopped to say something more than good morning. He died in 1987, in his ninety-seventh year, having outlived nearly everyone who might have championed him, and having gone on quietly composing until the very end. The last thing he wrote, at eighty-eight, was a set of twenty-four fugues for piano. That tells you something about the man’s priorities. Melody first, always. But counterpoint as a kind of moral discipline, a way of thinking he never abandoned even when the world had abandoned him.

This new disc of piano duo music won’t change Gál’s reputation overnight, because almost nobody has a reputation to change. That’s the scandal here. He directed the Mainz Conservatoire for a decade, a serious post held by a serious artist, until 1938, when the Nazis dismissed him for being Jewish. He’d been aiming for America. Fate, or rather Donald Francis Tovey, intervened, and diverted him to Edinburgh, initially to sort out the library of the Reid School of Music. He ended up staying fifty years, apart from a spell of internment as an enemy alien. He never got his American career. He got Edinburgh instead, and by all accounts made his peace with it: teaching, lecturing, writing studies of Brahms and Schubert that scholars still consult, and composing four symphonies and several operas that nobody now performs and that most of us will die without hearing. That’s not hyperbole. German opera houses don’t revive obscure Gál the way they revive obscure Zemlinsky. There’s no infrastructure for it, no advocate with the clout of a Kempe or a Rattle.

So we get the piano duos instead.

The disc opens with “Three Marionettes,” and here is Gál in miniature: witty, immaculately voiced, contrapuntally alert without ever showing off about it. This is music genuinely playable by two reasonably competent amateurs, which was rather the point. Gál grew up playing orchestral scores in four-hand arrangements with his sisters, learning the repertoire from the inside, the way nobody really does anymore with recordings so cheap and plentiful. There’s an intimacy in that tradition the concert hall can’t replicate: two people at one keyboard, elbows nearly touching, negotiating tempo by breath and glance rather than baton. It’s fitting, if accidental, that this should be the first commercial release of his music to appear in this country.

The Concertino is the real discovery for me. Originally scored for piano and strings back in 1934, it wears its lightness like a well-cut suit. Nothing labored, nothing overstated. The central Siciliano has a swaying, almost narcotic charm; you could put it on a loop and not tire of it, the kind of tune that seems to have always existed rather than been composed. Then a fugal finale snaps the mood back into focus, dexterous without turning academic. Gál never lets his learning show its teeth. Compare him here to Reger, who couldn’t resist grinding a fugue subject into the floor. Gál’s counterpoint breathes. It has air in it, Mendelssohnian almost in its lightness of touch.

The three Impromptus began life as party pieces, written for Saturday evenings with friends named — irresistibly — Willie McNaughton and Johnnie McGregor. You can hear the conviviality baked into the material: nothing pretentious, tunes that want company. And the closing Pastoral Tune, for six hands, carries its own small legend. Clifford Curzon once sat down to play it with Gál and Gál’s ten-year-old daughter Eva, got lost counting his part, and was informed briskly by the child that she didn’t need to count. I believe it. I’d have paid good money to be in that room.

Should the six early Serbian Dances, op. 3, feel like an afterthought here? A little, yes. They’re juvenilia, charming rather than searching, a backward glance at a young man’s harmless nationalism before Vienna and later Mainz refined his voice into something more particular. But even in these you sense the same unhurried melodic generosity that never left him.

The performances do the music proud without ever pretending it’s bigger than it is. No false grandeur, no attempt to inflate salon music into something symphonic. That restraint is exactly right, and it’s harder to achieve than it sounds; plenty of duos would be tempted to lean on the pedal and make more of it than Gál intended.

I want the Cello Concerto, op. 67, back on disc. I first heard it played by Joan Dickson, and it remains one of the loveliest unfashionable things I know, pure melodic invention with barely a trace of irony. I want the three Violin Sonatinas. I want the two dozen Preludes. There is, we’re told, a vast quantity of chamber music still waiting, and German labels have given us fragments — an Oboe Sonata, a Clarinet Sonata, the orchestral Promenadenmusik — but nothing like a systematic survey. Gál deserves one. He was not a revolutionary; he was something rarer, a craftsman of unimpeachable taste working steadily against the fashions of his century, first in