Krenek: Music for Chamber Orchestra – review

Ernst Krenek 's composing career stretched across 70 years. Beginning in Vienna immediately after the first world war and ending in California in the 1980s, his output explored virtually every significant stylistic innovation of the 20th century, except minimalism. This impressively played collection of pieces for chamber orchestra concentrates on his music from the 1970s; there's just one earlier European piece, the sensuously beautiful 1931 setting of Karl Kraus 's poem Die Nachtigall. In the later pieces, sections composed using 12-note technique are juxtaposed with those that are freely composed; in the 10 short movements of the suite Static and Ecstatic, the freely composed music provides interludes between the strictly serial ones, while in the single-movement Von Vorn Herein, the juxtaposition of the two techniques is much more seamless, so that stylistically the piece seems to hark back to the pre-12-note expressionism of the Second Viennese School. Yet there's a real freshness and energy about most of these pieces that's genuinely engaging – the only exception is The Dissembler, for baritone and ensemble, a setting of Krenek's own collage of texts that seems rather drily didactic.