Graener

All four works on this CD comes from Graener later period, which started around 1930 with the suite 'Die Flüte von Sancouci' This suite was to prove to be Graener most popular orchestral piece.
It is both remarkable and revealing - bearing in mind the background of the war in April 44, the bombing in Berlin and the need to flee from the city that Graener chose to base his last completed work on this particular German folk song from 1793 - Enjoy your life. This choice indicates an unbroken optimism that comes from Graener's unwaveringly positive attitude to life. The call to 'enjoy your life' is thus both a motto and an exhortation. Moreover, the final rondo is a symbol of the composer's gratitude to Wilhelm Zimmermann, who helped Graener financially.

Paul Graener was a latest romanticist with a strong inclination for French impressionism which as a composer in the Germany of the first half of the twentieth century makes him a unique case. This month cpo is presenting three of his concertos on our fourth Graener album. Once again it is shown that this music more than deserves to be rediscovered. Hardly any other companion of Paul Graeners so intensely supported his oeuvre as did the cellist Paul Grümmer, the dedicatee of this composers Cello Concerto and the soloist at its premiere in 1927.

Graener joined the Nazi Party and the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur in 1933. His early happy years (professionally and personally) in London motivated him to become a British subject, and he maintained this status throughout his life. A curious fact a British subject who held National Socialist posts! It is thus not surprising that until recently musicians and musicologists took a large detour around Graener. His music nevertheless merits our attention as it is anything but martial and national.

Musical director at the Haymarket Theatre in London, the director of the Mozarteum in Salzburg, a professor of composition at the Leipzig Conservatory, the director of the Stern Conservatory in Berlin, and a diligent composer who enjoyed a fair measure of success, Graener represented the latest of late romanticism and strongly tended toward French impressionism, which makes him unique among the composers from Germany during the first half of the twentieth century. This new release from CPO only emphasises the value in rediscovering these works.

The Symphony in D minor, subtitled “Schmiedt Schmerz” (or, “Sorrow the Blacksmith”) is a very typical, and very good example of traditional German Sturm und Drang in three well-wrought movements. Its thematic material is top quality, and happily Grainer does not equate the usual German enthusiasm for symphonic misery with dullness. The Adagio features a climax of Brucknerian grandeur without inflicting on us Brucknerian length (it lasts only six minutes). You can sample the coda of the tumultuous first movement below.

Erna Berger (19 October 1900 – 14 June 1990) was a German lyric coloratura soprano. She was best known for her Queen of the Night and her Konstanze.