★★★☆☆/★☆☆☆☆/★★★★☆
Pick ‘n’ mix albums hardly ever work, and for the same reason that it’s unwise to get into a hotel lift with three composers. None of them will make way and the last one in will invariably come out first.
What we have here is three phenomenal composers whose common denominator is that they wrote hugely successful modern operas that were banned by the Nazis. Franz Schreker dragged operatic sleaze one brothel and decibel beyond Richard Strauss in Salome. The overture to Schreker’s 1915 opera Die Gezeichneten (the branded) is an attention-seeking sonic synopsis, sweetly (and not too noisily) played here by the Orchestre national des pays de la Loire, conducted by Sascha Goetzel.
Krenek liked to spice up his scores with laconic quotations from other composers
Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose opera Die Tote Stadt was Vienna’s inter-war hit, is heard on this album in a Sinfonietta composed when he was 16. Over 43 minutes, it has many precocious gestures and no coherent theme.
Ernst Krenek, famed for his jazzy opera Jonny spiel auf, composed Potpourri in the same year, 1927, and with much the same rhythms. It’s a fizzing piece, the one yelp of delight in this mixed bag. Krenek, whom I met near the end of his life, liked to spice up his scores with laconic quotations from other composers. I counted Wagner, Mahler (and how!), Dvorak and possibly Gershwin. It’s that kind of piece — fruit gums with marshmallows. What’s not to like?
