Stanislav Khristenko - Ernst Krenek: Piano Music, Volume Two

This first extended survey of the piano music of Ernst Krenek (1900�92) continues with a range of works showing his craftsmanship and imagination � and humour. The early Toccata and Chaconne, Op. 13, 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, written a quarter-century later in American exile. The closing Sechs Vermessene are kaleidoscopic miniatures with an improvised quality, as if advanced musical modernism were meeting the freest of free jazz.