This week’s new album comes from the Pacifica Quartet, the ensemble in residence at the University of Indiana, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary with a collection of chamber works by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
The son of a Viennese music critic, Korngold was a child prodigy who wrote his first piece when he was 7 years old and had a ballet premier at the Vienna Court Opera when he was 13.
Korngold went on to build a career as an opera composer, but when the Nazis came to power, he left Austria for the United States, where he found work in Hollywood. From 1935 to 1947, he scored 16 films for Warner Brothers, including “Captain Blood,” “The Sea Hawk” and “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”
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Korngold returned to Vienna after World War II, but he was never able to replicate his earlier success. He died in relative obscurity in 1957.
The selections on this new Pacifica Quartet album show all of these sides of the composer. His String Sextet and his First String Quartet reflect the Viennese sound world of Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, two of his early influences. But Korngold’s Piano Quintet shows hints of his future direction. Here, the Pacifica Quartet is joined by pianist Orion Weiss:
By the 1930s, Korngold had established his own musical identity through a string of successful operas. This can clearly be heard in his Second String Quartet, one of the last works he premiered in Vienna before leaving in 1935.
Korngold had vowed to write only for the movies until Hitler was defeated, but in 1944, when Allied victory seemed within reach, he composed his first chamber work in a decade. Like many of his late works, the Third String Quartet borrowed heavily from his film scores, like “The Sea Wolf” and “Devotion,” and for that reason, it never received much attention at the time.
This new and beautifully played album from the Pacifica Quartet and friends should shed new light on a composer whose works beyond the cinema have been neglected for too long. The Korngold Collection is out now on the Cedille label.
