JAVS Fall 2016

Violacentrism is good fun, but in the end I was left with the impression of having listened to a soundtrack without having seen the movie, and wishing for more of a Gesamtkunstwerk in the Wagnerian sense. Not necessarily an opera, but perhaps an imaginative viola studio could create a pantomime or ballet to accompany Slapin’s score. An additional track with an “Encore” of the piece’s Finale arranged for massed violas— performed by the Penn State Viola Ensemble—would seem to point in this direction. There remains the small matter that the music of Violacentrism is of decidedly virtuoso character for both players. With this CD, Scott Slapin and Tanya Solomon have unsurprisingly set the bar extremely high for any violists wishing to try their hands at the score (available, incidentally, from www. violacentrism.com).

of the Arts. In 1932 he won the Felix-Mendelssohn Bartholdy-Staat-Stipendium, and seemed all set for a successful career. But it was not to be: a year later, the Nazis came to power and Hannenheim’s music was declared “degenerate,” and he could only find work as a copyist and arranger of folk songs. Nevertheless, he continued to compose “for the drawer.” Around 1936 he showed a viola sonata to the eminent Berlin violist Emil Seiler, whose enthusiastic comments prompted him to write a suite and a second sonata. The greatest part of Hannenheim’s compositions remained unpublished and existed only in unique autograph manuscripts; a suitcase containing most of them was lost in a bomb attack on Berlin during WWII. The mentally unstable composer was confined to a psychiatric clinic and later deported to one of the euthanasia institutions operated by the Nazis. Although he was still alive at the end of the war, Hannenheim died shortly afterwards of heart failure. Copies of the three aforementioned viola works were found many years later among Seiler’s papers, and others emerged in unsuspected places. About one fifth of the roughly two-hundred and forty compositions that Hannenheim is known to have written are now accounted for. This CD includes all the known viola works. Hannenheim wrote listener-friendly atonal music. He took Schoenberg’s method of “composing with twelve notes related only to each other” one step further: instead of working with rows of twelve notes, he used (to quote the booklet notes) “a melody treated like a row.” The opening movement of the first viola sonata, e.g., is based upon a row of 54 notes that, upon being repeated, is “rhythmically modified and stabilizes the structure of the movement like a cantus firmus.” Additionally, and undoubtedly influenced by his Romanian origins, Hannenheim uses highly personal, irregular rhythms including meters of five and seven beats. Although thoroughly construed, some passages sound like written-out jazz riffs. Hannenheim had a keen ear for the viola sound; he often uses the C string and gives the instrument nostalgically tinged, songful lines, but also—like at the end of the second sonata—a few virtuoso passages at breakneck speed. This recording project is a labor of love by Romanian violist, Aida-Carmen Soanea. She and Igor Kamenz are

Norbert von Hannenheim: Stück No. 1, 3 and 4 for viola and piano; Duo for violin and viola; Suite for viola and piano; Sonata No. 1 for viola and piano; Sonata No. 2 for viola and piano. Aida-Carmen Soanea, viola; Igor Kamenz, piano; Adrian Pinzaru, violin. Challenge Classics CC72734. The fate of Norbert von Hannenheim (1898-1945) was among the grimmest at a particularly cruel moment in history. Born into a German family in Transylvania, Romania, he was one of the most talented students in Arnold Schoenberg’s class at the Berlin Academy

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 32, No. 2, Fall 2016

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