Von Albrecht: Piano works

Extensive, very detailed and useful information about this interesting composer and his music, reviews and a sound bite in the following link

http://www.realsound.it/en/articoli_dettaglio.htx?chiave(a)=152

Georg von Albrecht, who was born in 1891 in Kasan, on the Volga River in Tatarstan, and who died in Heidelberg in 1976, viewed himself as a musician positioned between East and West. The ancestors of his father, who was a mathematician and university inspector, had immigrated to the Caucusus from Ulm, Germany, at the beginning of the 19th century. His mother, a concert pianist, was Russian. Shortly after his birth, the family moved from Kasan to St. Petersburg. Later, from 1911 to 1914, his mother made it possible for her talented son to study at the Stuttgart Conservatory, staying with him for the duration. Von Albrecht studied piano there with Max von Pauer and composition with Heinrich Lang. Sojourns in the Crimea during the semester breaks were used by him for composing.

Starting in 1914 he studied composition with Sergei Taneyev in Moscow, and in 1915 moved to St. Petersburg to continue his studies in composition with Alexander Glasunov and Jazeps Vitols.

Albrecht spent the years 1919 to 1922 in Yalta, where he founded a private conservatory and was in personal contact with the composer Vladimir Rebikov. Just as he had earlier worked with Georgian and Lithuanian folk songs, he now turned to the music of the Greek Orthodox church and Byzantine chorale. In 1923 he accepted a teaching position in Moscow at an affiliate of the Conservatory and also continued to do research in folk song.

Because of the increasing pressures in cultural politics in Soviet Russia, he that very year joined the large wave of immigrants which brought numerous artists and musicians, including composer colleagues such as Arthur Lourié, into exil in western Europe or America.

Georg von Albrecht went once again to Stuttgart, working there for the eurythmics class of the Waldorf School and also performing as a concert pianist. In 1924 he took over the direction of the Russian-Greek-Orthodox church choir, the "Stuttgart Musical-Anthropological Alliance".

In 1936 he became an instructor for ear-training, then in 1939 for harmony at the Stuttgart Music Conservatory. After 1946 he taught harmony and composition there. He moved to the Conservatory in Heidelberg in 1956 and continued teaching there until an advanced age. His late, sacred ^uvre was composed there, too. For his compositional ^uvre and his ethnomusicological research Georg von Albrecht was awarded the Glinka Prize of the Belyayev Foundation and the Johann-Wenzel-Stamitz Prize of the Künstlergilde, Esslingen.

Characteristics of von Albrecht's style and the changes they underwent are especially distinct in his works for piano. Gerhard Frommel, who emphasized the "uncompromising, unforgiving" and "unperfumed" aspects of this music, divided them into three groups: the folkloristic, the late Romantic and the new-style sound experiments (in the Festschrift Georg von Albrecht, Stuttgart 1962).

The three piano sonatas on this CD (the composer left four all together) present as it were the various ingredients of Albrecht's musical language in changing proportions and with different emphases: pentatonic, through which the composer linked up with his early "folkloristic" works; modality, including new scales created from the overtone and undertone rows, polytonality and mirror technique &endash; all means of shaping the material which are not always unproblematical in relation to sonata forming.

Georg Von Albrecht (1891-1976)

Sonata in G sharp minor op 34

Sonata in C minor op 53

Mirroring. Sonata on a twelve tone theme op 72

Birgitta Wollenweber, piano

RS recording

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