ERNST KRENEK (1900-1991): Piano Music, Vol. 2 - Toccata and Chaconne über den Choral “Ja ich glaub an Jesum Christum”, Op. 13, Eine kleine Suite von Stücken über denselbigen Choral, verschiedenen Charakters, Op. 13a, 2 Suiten, Op. 26, Piano Sonata No. 5, Op. 121, 6 Vermessene, Op. 168.

Description: This first extended survey of Krenek’s piano music continues with a range of works showing his craftsmanship and imagination – and humor. The early Toccata and Chaconne, Op. 13 (1922), has its origins in a joke intended to pull the legs of musicologists and music critics, but it develops into a massive contrapuntal essay of astonishing ambit. Krenek’s treatment of Baroque and contemporary dances in the three early suites reveal a fondness for learned whimsy – and that wry dispassion informs even the elegiac and brittle Fifth Sonata of 1950, written a quarter-century later in American exile. The closing Sechs Vermessene (1958) are kaleidoscopic miniatures with an improvised quality, as if advanced musical modernism were meeting the freest of free jazz. Stanislav Khristenko (piano).