Raphael: Viola Works and Chamber Music – Rainer Moog

Somewhere in the vast unmarked cemetery of twentieth-century German music lies Günter Raphael, a composer who deserves better than a footnote about his partial Jewish ancestry and the professional silence the Nazis imposed on him. Querstand, bless them, keeps digging him up, disc by disc, and this one is a particularly rich exhumation.

Start with the Solo Sonata for Viola, op. 7 — a young man’s piece, written when Raphael was barely into his twenties and still working out how much Reger he could carry without buckling under the weight. You hear the debt everywhere: the thick contrapuntal writing, the harmonic wandering that seems reluctant to resolve, the sense of a composer testing how far tonality can stretch before it snaps. Twenty-six minutes is a lot of unaccompanied viola to ask of any listener, and truthfully the piece sags in the middle. But there’s real craft in the third movement, where legato lines dissolve into pizzicato snap and back again — Rainer Moog handles the transitions with a dry, papery precision that suggests he’s lived inside this score for decades, which, it turns out, he has. The Andante variations that follow breathe more easily, and the Gigue at the close has a heel-kicking assertiveness that almost — almost — justifies the sonata’s length.

Moog recorded this in 2011, well into his seventies, and there’s a fractional loss of the effortless fluency he shows elsewhere on this disc — most strikingly in the 1967 Trio, where his tone has an almost impatient vitality. Not a criticism so much as an observation: late Moog is still better than most violists at any age, but the ear notices the difference across a forty-four-year gap.

The real discovery here — and Querstand, oddly, doesn’t make much noise about it — is the Concertino for Flute, op. 82, captured in what appears to be its first broadcast rendition, a few days before the actual premiere, with Karel Ančerl conducting the Berlin Radio Symphony in December 1957. Ančerl’s presence alone makes this historically valuable; he was not a director who wasted his baton on negligible scores. Erwin Milzkott’s flute has a cool, silvery focus that suits Raphael’s spare orchestral fabric, and the recording, despite its vintage, has more presence than you’d expect — you can hear stage boards creak faintly beneath the woodwinds. The piece itself, written in 1956, is lean and unsentimental, closer to late Hindemith than to the plush late-Romanticism of the Solo Sonata. Raphael had by then absorbed decades of hardship — dismissal from his teaching post, wartime silence, a heart condition that would kill him within four years of this performance — and something of that austerity has entered the musical bloodstream.

Between these two poles sits the Concertino for Viola, unpublished, written in 1941 but not heard until 1946 — itself a small historical drama, since Raphael composed it during the years the regime had effectively erased him from German musical life. The opening is arresting: solo viola alone, then joined by winds in a texture so exposed you can practically see the void Raphael is deliberately creating, a gap he then fills with sly instrumental cunning rather than brute orchestration. When the brass finally enters — heavy-booted, dark, faintly menacing — the temperature of the whole piece drops. It ends not in triumph but in something like a chorale, restrained, almost resigned. Fuad Ibrahimov conducts the Kammerorchester der Christine Raphael Stiftung (named, poignantly, for the composer’s violinist daughter) with an unforced sobriety that never overplays the music’s darker implications. Wise choice — this score doesn’t need help sounding grim.

The 1940 Trio for flute, violin, and viola supplies the disc’s emotional whiplash. After the concerto’s gravity, the trio’s opening bursts in almost defiantly cheerful, skittish even, as if Raphael were determined to pretend nothing was wrong. Then the slow movement — marked “Mit grosser Ruhe” — arrives like cold water, hymn-like, stark, and suddenly the earlier jauntiness reads as bravado rather than genuine lightness. You don’t need program notes reminding you what year this is, or what was happening to composers of partial Jewish descent under the Reich, to feel the undertow here. Willy Schwegler’s flute and Günter Gugel’s violin, with Moog again on viola in this 1967 recording, balance beautifully — three equal voices, no one hogging the texture, which is harder to achieve in this combination than it sounds.

Is Raphael a great composer unjustly ignored, or a good one properly remembered by specialists and few others? I lean toward the latter, though this disc argues his case as persuasively as any album could. The performances are never less than dedicated, occasionally (Ančerl, Moog at his 1967 best) genuinely distinguished. Recommended, with the caveat that this is repertoire for the curious rather than the casual — but the curious will be well rewarded.