Piano Trio Op. 8 in F Major
1 Kräftig und feurig, nicht zu schnell 8:04
2 Langsam, nicht schleppen 13:41
3 Mässig schnell, etwas frei im Vortrag 6:05
4 Rasch und wild 16:29

Piano Trio in B Flat Major
5 Allegro molto 11:00
6 Romanze. Andante 6:40
7 Scherzo. Ziemlich schnell 3:21

Robert Schumann Trio:
Kees Hülsmann, violin
Marien von Staalen, cello
Josef De Beenhouwer, piano

A piano trio by Pfitzner may seem a daunting prospect, especially when the piece in question lasts for three-quarters of an hour (Op. 8): perhaps this was the reasoning behind CPO's 'special price' for this product. That said, it is difficult to imagine anyone with a penchant for late-Romantic music being disappointed by this release.

Chamber music was part of the entire gamut of Pfitzner's creative life - his Op. 1 was his Cello Sonata in F sharp minor. The major work on this disc, the Piano Trio in F, Op. 8, dates from 1896; it is the longest composition of his early period. Pfitzner's cup positively overflows with invention. One of his compositional credos was that one idea naturally gives birth to another, and certainly there is a momentum of ideas which makes the eight-minute first movement ('Kräftig und feurig, nicht zu schnell') so compelling. This is in fact true of both of the outer movements (the last movement, 'Rasch und wild', is quite invigorating to listen to).

The very opening shows where Pfitzner's 'difficult' reputation comes from. The texture he creates is best described as 'large', full of late-Romantic sweep. But this just emphasises the contrasts Pfitzner is able to call on: try the beautifully calm patch around 5'50, as fragments are exchanged between instruments.

All three members of the Robert Schumann Trio get chances to shine. Perhaps it is Kees Hülsmann's sweet-toned violin which should come in for special mention. His sound suits the lyrical basis of this music and he excels himself in the slow movement, which moves to a tender, yet impassioned, climax.

The B flat Piano Trio, which dates from 1886, a full decade earlier, is much less demanding fare. The author of the booklet notes, Hans Rectanus, claims to have reconstructed and published the trio from material in the Austrian National Library in Vienna and the Bavarian State Library (Munich).

This is the music of youth. The booklet notes accuse the first movement of being 'a little long', something the Robert Schumann Trio set out to disprove: and what a convincing case they make! The second movement is similarly fresh, inspiring the booklet note writer to purple prose. The Romanze 'could be a scene with two lovers. "She" (violin) and "he" (cello) flirt with one another, let go, and finally come to rest in perfect happiness'. Again however, Rectanus feels the third movement Scherzo makes a 'somewhat clumsy impression'. Actually, it is great fun, and the Trio is really affecting. Well worth exploring. ---Colin Clarke, musicweb-international.com

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1. Mensch und Natur Part I
2. Mensch und Natur Part II
3. Mensch und Natur Part III
4. Mensch und Natur Part IV
5. Mensch und Natur Part VI
6. Leben und Singen Part I
7. Leben und Singen Part II
8. Liederteil Part I
9. Liederteil Part II
10. Liederteil Part III

Annelies Kupper, soprano
Margarethe Bence, alto
Fritz Wunderlich, tenor
Ernst Denger, bass
Philharmonischer Chor Stuttgart
Radio Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart
Heinz Mende, conductor

Stuttgart, Liederhalle, 27.X.1958

Von deutscher Seele, cantata for soloists, chorus, organ & orchestra, Op. 28. With the triumphant Munich premiere of Palestrina on June 12, 1917, Pfitzner became de facto spokesman for German musical conservatism, perversely targeting Busoni as his bête noire and attributing to him everything threatening the comfortable post-Romantic vein within which he'd carved his own peculiar niche. The month before, Pfitzner published his attack on Busoni, "The Danger of Futurism." "Futurism" was a loaded word. Busoni cast a skeptically sympathetic eye on the Futurists, a movement led by polemicist and animateur Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The most often reproduced portrait of Busoni was painted by Futurist Umberto Boccioni. But Futurist musicians were never taken seriously, as large ideas -- for instance, Luigi Russolo's book The Art of Noises -- yielded little achievement. Linking Busoni with Futurism amounted to a vicious slander prompted by wartime chauvinism. An Italian, Busoni was felt to be a "foreign body" in German musical life, yet it was unforgivable that he should have taken refuge from the Great War in Switzerland, while Pfitzner remained in Germany. In 1919 Pfitzner again attacked Busoni in the inflammatory pamphlet "The New Aesthetics of Musical Impotence." But when Busoni returned to Berlin in 1920, he, Pfitzner, and Franz Schreker were appointed by former Busoni pupil Leo Kestenberg, musical advisor to the Prussian Ministry of Science, Culture, and Education, to lead prestigious master composition classes. Pfitzner's Welanschauung was more obviously challenged by Schreker, the sensationalist purveyor of musical eroticism, but it was Busoni for whom his venom was reserved. Pfitzner's Palestrina depicted that composer as a savior of the ancient polyphonic tradition challenged by the rise of the Florentine Academy and its invention of opera, a situation similar to his own conservative neo-Romanticism amid burgeoning Modernism, and it is not too much to see in his Romantic cantata Von deutscher Seele, composed in 1921, his own Pope Marcellus Mass -- a credo and testament. For soloists, chorus, and orchestra, playing around an hour and 40 minutes, this gargantuan work (close to the sound-world of Mahler's "Symphony of a Thousand") visits attentions upon Eichendorff's slender, gnomic verses whose opening line -- "It's all quite other than you think" -- forecasts the chimerical gist of the whole. The German soul, apparently, is riven with abysses and sudden reversals. First performed in Berlin on January 27,1922, Von deutscher Seele soon gathered an enthusiastic following. In 1928 Othmar Schoeck set several of the same poems in Wandersprüche, for baritone and chamber orchestra, in a compactly acerb manner looming as a proto-expressionist antithesis to Pfitzner's aesthetic. --- Adrian Corleonis, Rovi

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