Topic: Max Reger(1873-1916)

[vers la flamme]

Nice haul, and good choices all !

..............

Listening to the sonata op 122 and the Suite op 103a for violin and piano. The latter work is made up of 6 pieces that Reger specifically composed in the dual role of standalone recital pieces or of a suite in 6 movements. Reger always had practicality in mind when composing works, in the wake of Haydn and preceding Hindemith in that regard. Very romantic works, played with great feeling by Wallin and Pōntinen.

Thanks! I'm looking forward to hearing all of it (eventually), and to clarify my previous post, the organ music in question is on Naxos. That CPO looks nice too, but I think I'm going to hold off on any more Reger for now until I can assimilate my recent acquisitions.

[Herman]

at the mo I would agree [with Andre's preceding comment, preferring the Hiller Variations], since the Hillers have been in my cd-player for more than a week now.

I love the  as if classical-ness of the Mozart Variations  -  with, mind you, a whole bit of churning Wagnerian chromaticism in the slow variation  -  and perhaps the concluding fugue is just a tad better.

However the Hillers have this same wild, crazy deep-in-the-night sound world as the piano concerto. They are op 100 and op 101.

The orchestration in both of these variation suites is just do die for. No triangle or other funny sound effects, just the technical mastery of mixing instrument groups and dividing instrument groups infinitely. Sometimes all the string groups are divided up, and you have four different lines in the violins alone.

I'm not "responding to self" because I find myself so interesting, I was actually responding to Andre.

There may be some tiredness in the works near the end. For instance I find those big orchestral Lieder (opp 136 and 144) not too hopping. It's like Reger is trying to tone himself down in those works.

There is part of this in the Mozart Variations, too, but it's like he can't keep his true nature down, and the last variation (molto sostenuto) is just deeply chromatic and in the concluding fugue the sound world gets that wild woodsy character familiar from the Piano Cto and the Hiller Variations. Even though there are nog trombones or tuba in the Mozart Variations. Officially it's scored for "small orchestra"  -  though you'd never know this while listening.

The Mozart fugue's material is perhaps better than in the Hillers, and the concluding pages with the horns / trumpets in a celestial waltz (in 6/8) knocks it out of the park for me.

[Symphonic Addict]

The other day I was listening to this relatively recent CPO release. Bold, confident performances of two works whose moods are different each other.

[Herman]

That's a good combo, 146 and 118.

[Jo498]

This coupling was also done by Sabine Meyer and the Vienna Sextet but it has been long oop as a single disc, I think. There are many recordings of the clarinet quintet but far fewer of the sextet, so it is good to have another one available.

[Herman]

I also have a 1977 recording of the Sextet on Jecklin, by the socalled Kammermusiker Zürich.

There is reason to believe someone at Jecklin liked Max Reger.

[JBS]

This coupling was also done by Sabine Meyer and the Vienna Sextet but it has been long oop as a single disc, I think. There are many recordings of the clarinet quintet but far fewer of the sextet, so it is good to have another one available.

The Sabine Mayer recording is part of Warner's Reger: Centenary Collection set.  The musicians in the Sextet are listed individually, but I would presume they are the Vienna Sextet you refer to.

[Jo498]

Yes, this centenary collection was the only re-issue I know of

MDG also has a disc of the same pieces with Villa Musica, they have all? of his chamber music for trio or larger, not sure about the solo and duo sonatas.

[Herman]

The past weeks I have been listening to the Clarinet Quintet, op 146, a lot. It's Reger's last completed work, before he died at age 43.

I seem to have three recordings, Karl Leister and the Vogler Quartet; Sabine Meyer and members of the Vienna Sextet and Sharon Kam with Isabele van Keulen, Ulrike Anima Mathé, Volker Jacobsen and Gustav Rivinus. All are very good performances (although I have long ceased to be a fan of Leister), but at the moment I prefer the Kam recording, if only because they avoid at all times a cloying sound in the strings, which the Vogler Quartet don't always do. I should get the new CPO recording with the Diogenes Quartet soon.

The work is extraordinary. I rate it higher than the Brahms quintet, which I find playing into the soaring clarinet thing too much. Reger often lets the clarinet merge, if not submerge, in the strings. There is a lot of pp writing for the wind instrument. It goes both ways; in the Scherzo's Trio the upper strings play shimmery figures that make them sound like wind instruments.

It's also a work of radical (faux) simplicity for Reger. The Largo in E major has a lot of chromaticism after the opening bars in simple E major, however the lines never get clogged. It's intriguing to find that in the entire work motives reappear, particularly a three-note chromatic motiv that keeps driving all four movements. The simplicity climaxes, as it were, in the last variation in the finale, when the strings are reduced to rhythmic accompaniment for a dozen bars, just to give the clarinet one last song.

In spite of the apparent serenity there is a kind of impatience to op. 146. There are no exposition repeats, and in the variation finale there are no repeats either. Everything is over when it's over, and it's off to the next thing, which is quite devastating if one thinks it's Reger's valedictory work which he himself never got to hear. Another intriguing structural thing is the final variation movement is constructed on a vaguely incomplete sounding theme, seventeen bars long, instead of the eighteen bars you'd expect.