Schattenrisse: Orchestral Works by Ostracized Composers. BENNO UHLFELDER (1868 – 1946) : Sangre Torera (Spanish Fantasia). MAURICE JAUBERT (1900 – 1940) Suite from the music for the Film „Quatorze Juillet“ (orchestrated by Jan Michael Horstmann). VÍTEZSLAVA KAPRÁLOVÁ (1915 – 1940) : Miniature Suite, Op. 1. DARIUS MILHAUD (1892 – 1974) : Le Carnaval de Londres op. 172. ALEXANDER NAUMOVITCH „BOB“ TSFASMAN (1906 – 1971) : Jazz-Suite für piano, strings and percussion (orchestration by Rustem Abyazov) : NIKOLAI ANDREYEVICH ROSLAVETS (1881 – 1944) Symphonie de chambre (1934/35).

Description: This enterprising and musically excellent set seeks to rehabilitate works by composers who were repressed, suppressed, exiled or who otherwise suffered under the turbulent political events of the 20th century. This is a project of the Lichterfeld Foundation of Petra and Ralph-Robert Lichterfeld in the context of their project “EchoSpore” (www.echospore.de). The foundation is committed to ensuring that these works, and with them, the names of so many composers who were ostracized, disenfranchised, persecuted, forced into exile, ghettoized, imprisoned in camps, and murdered, can once again enjoy a place in the concert repertoire. Benno Uhlfelder was born in Bayreuth in 1868 to Jewish parents and raised in Nuremberg with seven siblings. He travelled to New York to complete his musical studies and take on his first engagements as a pianist and conductor. Back in Germany, he worked in Dresden and Berlin. He fled via Brussels to South America in August 1933. There he settled in Argentina and continued to work very actively as a composer, journalist, and author until he died in 1946. Uhlfelder, who was fluent in Spanish and holder of the Knight‘s Cross of the Order of Isabel la Católica expressed his love for the Spanish people and their language with this lively, exciting and colourful work which lternates between waltz and polka, and between sentimental adagios and wild bullfight scenes. Jaubert was not directly persecuted or suppressed, but as a war casualty at the age of 40 - he was wounded in a battle near Azerailles and succumbed to his injuries in a military hospital - he was denied the lasting success and recognition that his early career promised; for instance, he did not live to see that Francois Truffaut later set four of his films to Jaubert’s music. He wrote this music for René Clair’s film “Quatorze Juillet” (he also wrote the scores for other major films including “Hôtel du Nord” and “Drôle de drame”). This suite, arranged for the Mitteldeutsche Kammerphilharmonie by J.M. Hortsmann from the published piano version, includes four dance movements as well as the chanson “À Paris, dans chaque faubourg". Three days before Jaubert’s death, one of the great hopes of 20th-century Czech music died: at just 25 years old, Vítězslava Kaprálová became a victim of the German occupation, dying of a still-unexplained illness in a refugee camp near the Mediterranean coast while fleeing the occupation of Paris. Her first orchestral composition, the remarkable Suite en miniature, rooted in Slavic romanticism with an impressionistic transparency of orchestration, manages in 12 minutes to traverse the Romantic arc from tragedy to triumph. The dark-hued Praeludium, with its intense, tragic atmosphere, is scored for strings and the contrasting lyrical, bucolic Pastorale for wind instruments; and the melancholy, slightly agitated Lullaby, which finally reaches repose, for small chamber orchestra, to which Kaprálová added a trumpet, timpani, triangle and cymbals in the robust final Menuett, ending the composition in an upbeat, exuberant mood. The prolific Milhaud was not, of course, inhibited from the production of his huge compositional output, but we was obliged to leave Europe in the late 1930s and relocate to America. He decided to write his own music for John Gay’s satirical “Beggar’s Opera”, one of the most successful pieces of English theatre ever in 18th century London. His suite - immediately identifiable as Milhaud, less so as having anything to do with Baroque England - exudes French richness of color, Italian melodicism, and Brazilian rhythm. The artistic fate of Alexander “Bob” Tsfasman, one of the great pioneers of jazz in the young Soviet Union, was typical of that of artists whose work was not readily identifiable with Socialist Realism. Trained both in classical and entertainment piano, Tsfasman founded the country’s first jazz band in 1926. By the mid-1940s he was one of the country’s most successful and wealthy artists, composing orchestral works well beyond his band lineup and participating as a pianist in performances of classical compositions. The Soviet Union’s relationship to jazz was, as expected, ambivalent and marked by much discord. Stalin outlawed it as “bourgeois,” and it was banned on and off thereafter, and flirtations with it were risky. Tsfasman was banned in 1946, which largely prevented him from further developing his art. He withdrew almost entirely from cultural life, had no ambitions to establish a band or orchestra even when the reins were loosened, and composed only occasional minor entertainment works until he died in 1971. Fortunately, a number of works survive, including the infectious, brilliant Jazz Suite for piano and orchestra, (heard here in an arrangement for piano, strings, and percussion by Rustem Abyazov, the artistic director of the chamber orchestra “La Primavera” in Kazan). The seductive Lyric Waltz must surely have influenced Shostakovich when he wrote his Jazz Suites, and the scintillating opening movement and madcap finale (with its cheeky hat-tip to Chopin's Octave Study and exuberantly extravagant virtuosity) are definitely precursors of Kapustin. Roslavets' Chamber Symphony is a 56-minute work only published in 2005, and composed in 1934-5. The January 1936 denunciations of Shostakovich and any kind of progressive music prevented its performance at the time; with its highly contrapuntal textures and melodic expressiveness, its most obvious precursor is Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, Op. 9. Scored for nine winds, two horns, trumpet, piano, string quartet and double bass, the work has elements of Russian folksong, especially in the scherzo, and sardonic, jazz elements suggestive of Weill, Eisler and the young Shostakovich as well as a significant hangover of the late Romantic expressionism of Scriabin. Mitteldeutsche Kammerphilharmonie Schönebeck; Jan Michael Horstmann, conductor; Sofia Gülbadamova, piano. 2CDs.