Marx and Korngold Chamber Works – New York Piano Quartet

Ghosts have a way of returning to the concert hall when you least expect them, and Joseph Marx is as persistent a ghost as Austrian music has produced. Furtwängler thought him the leading force in Austrian music of his day — a judgment that looks eccentric now, given how thoroughly Marx vanished from the textbooks. Listen to this disc, though, and the eccentricity starts to seem more like prophecy deferred.

Marx wrote almost all his considerable work before the age of thirty, then spent the next five decades as a critic, teacher, and administrator: director of the Vienna Academy, dean of composition, the kind of institutional eminence that so often smothers a creative voice rather than sustaining one. The Rhapsodie of 1911 comes from the productive burst that also produced the Scherzo and Ballade for the same forces that year, an odd little flowering of piano-quartet writing that followed on the heels of Reger and Goldmark without any obvious explanation beyond the fact that Vienna in 1911 was awash in harmonic possibility and young composers wanted somewhere to put it.

The Rhapsodie is not modest. It unfolds across four continuous sections. The score abandons even the courtesy of tempo markings after the opening Mäßig, offering only bar numbers, as if Marx wanted to discourage anyone from mistaking this for a well-behaved sonata structure. What you get instead is one long harmonic flood: chromatic saturation in the Reger manner, sequences that swell and collapse, moments of real ecstatic overreach that recall Zemlinsky at his most feverish. The New York Piano Quartet — Elmira Darvarova, Ronald Carbone, Samuel Magill, with Linda Hall at the keyboard — play it as though they believe every note, which is exactly the right strategy with music this unfashionable. Darvarova’s violin has an appropriately unbuttoned quality in the outer sections, full-bodied without curdling into wallow. Hall’s piano writing in the extended introduction to the third section is gorgeously voiced. Marx gives the pianist a real showpiece there, all rolling arpeggios and thickened inner voices, and Hall doesn’t shortchange a single one of them.

Does the piece hang together? Not entirely, and I’m not sure it’s meant to. This is rhapsody as psychological state rather than architecture, closer to the free-fantasia tradition than to any four-square quartet movement, and the performers wisely don’t try to impose a discipline the music resists. What I missed, occasionally, was more differentiation of color between the “yearning” second section and the squalls around it. The tempo distinctions blur a little in rendition, though that may be Marx’s fault as much as the players’.

Korngold fares better in history’s memory, for reasons that have nothing to do with quality and everything to do with cinema. The Suite for piano left hand, two violins, and cello, op. 23, was written in 1930 for Paul Wittgenstein, the one-armed pianist — brother of the philosopher — who lost his right arm in the first war and spent the rest of his career commissioning left-hand repertoire from every composer he could persuade or bully into it. Ravel wrote his famous concerto for the same commission. Korngold’s contribution is less celebrated but hardly less inventive, full of the harmonic opulence and formal cunning that would later serve him so well in Hollywood, though this predates the film career by several years. Carbone switches to viola here, and the ensemble balance Korngold demands — one hand’s worth of piano against four string lines — asks real listening discipline of everyone involved. They provide it. The slow movement in particular breathes with the kind of tenderness Korngold rarely gets credit for outside the concerto and the opera Die toten Stadt.

Is this essential listening? Not for everyone, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But Marx deserves better than the oblivion Chailly lamented, and this release, imperfect and occasionally underdifferentiated but committed in every bar, makes as persuasive a case as I’ve heard for letting the ghost back in the door.