Toch Talk

[Scarpia]

Listened to my first Toch this evening, Symphony No 2.  Really fascinating music, not organized around harmony primarily, but different melodic lines and sonorities that intersect with each other.  The highlight may be the third (slow) movement in which intricate, interweaving woodwind melodies gradually gather momentum, and are jointed by more legato phrases from the strings to reach an imposing climax.  The closing of the last movement contains some sounds I can say I have never hear the like of in orchestral music.  Very impressive, and I will be looking for more. 

[Scarpia]

Listened to the next part of the disc, the third symphony.  The music seems more uneven, but with some really outstanding contrapuntal writing in the third movement.  The recording is much too distant for my taste, however, perhaps to accommodate some of the odd sonorities that punctuate the music.  Some of the odd invented instruments that Toch specified seem to have been replaced by conventional substitutes (suspended cymbal for the "hisser," various percussion instruments for the glass spheres and rotating box of wooden balls).  However, the choices are limited to this one and the original Steinberg recording form the 1950's.

[Mirror Image]

Listened to the next part of the disc, the third symphony.  The music seems more uneven, but with some really outstanding contrapuntal writing in the third movement.  The recording is much too distant for my taste, however, perhaps to accommodate some of the odd sonorities that punctuate the music.  Some of the odd invented instruments that Toch specified seem to have been replaced by conventional substitutes (suspended cymbal for the "hisser," various percussion instruments for the glass spheres and rotating box of wooden balls).  However, the choices are limited to this one and the original Steinberg recording form the 1950's.

Yes, I've had a similar reaction earlier tonight as I listened to Symphonies 1 & 4. To me, the music sounds like a bunch of chromatic lines with no rhyme or reason as to where the music is going. I bought the set cheap as hell last October and it had remained shelved until tonight, but to my disappointment, I'm not going to revisit the music anytime soon in hopes that time will be the great healer between myself and Toch's music.

[Scarpia]

Yes, I've had a similar reaction earlier tonight as I listened to Symphonies 1 & 4. To me, the music sounds like a bunch of chromatic lines with no rhyme or reason as to where the music is going. I bought the set cheap as hell last October and it had remained shelved until tonight, but to my disappointment, I'm not going to revisit the music anytime soon in hopes that time will be the great healer between myself and Toch's music.

I haven't listened to symphonies 1 or 4 yet.  I'd suggest listening to the second symphony before giving up on Toch, it made a very positive impression on me. 

I've just listened to William Steinberg's original recording of the 3rd, and early stereo FDS recording from 1956.  Steinberg's recording strikes me as much more successful than the newer cpo recording, the sound is much more "in your face" and the arresting sonorities and motific writing style is more engaging (although the limitations of the 1956 technology are evident).   In any case, not as immediately engaging as the second symphony, but interesting.

[Mirror Image]

I'd suggest listening to the second symphony before giving up on Toch

Giving up is an option I haven't considered, Scarpia. Plus, I doubt that would be very fair to Toch's music. This said, I'm simply going to return to his music after I've absorbed some other music. This may take weeks, months, years...who knows? Right now, my mind is preoccupied with some Jewish American music, which I have been meaning to checkout for a year or so.

[jlaurson]

Chasing Heidi: Ernst Toch – The Composer and His Chamber Music

http://www.weta.org/fmblog/?p=3191

[Mirror Image]

This thread has been inactive for too long! I'm going to try and get back into Toch's music. I have the symphony set on CPO w/ Francis. How would you describe Toch's musical style? I know his symphonies are diverse in style. Any other recordings you can recommend? I know his SQs are highly rated. Thanks in advance.

[Mirror Image]

I read through this thread and the discourse was quite disappointing. I learned nothing about Toch's music. Hello? Is there anybody out there who has some real knowledge of the music and can help somebody who wants to understand the composer's musical language?

[Mirror Image]

I re-listened to Toch's 1st and 4th symphonies tonight and I'm still having the same problems I've had earlier with them: endless chromatic phrases that appear to go nowhere. I think these two symphonies are quite impersonal. They really don't offer, to my ears, anything substantial or any place where a listener, who doesn't have a music degree, can find some kind of access point. These are tough nuts for sure.

[lescamil]

The Piano Concerto and the 3rd Symphony have had the most success with me. The Piano Concerto is in a gritty idiom that he unfortunately didn't do too much of by the time he wrote his symphonies. It sounds like angry Hindemith to me, and in the best possible way. The piano writing is varied and fresh, especially for a work from the 1920s. The 3rd Symphony has a bit of that angst, but with more control and maturity, and with a greater sense of drama. I need to revisit the other symphonies myself, though.

[Mirror Image]

The Piano Concerto and the 3rd Symphony have had the most success with me. The Piano Concerto is in a gritty idiom that he unfortunately didn't do too much of by the time he wrote his symphonies. It sounds like angry Hindemith to me, and in the best possible way. The piano writing is varied and fresh, especially for a work from the 1920s. The 3rd Symphony has a bit of that angst, but with more control and maturity, and with a greater sense of drama. I need to revisit the other symphonies myself, though.

I'll check these works out, especially the 3rd symphony. Thanks.

[snyprrr]

I'll check these works out, especially the 3rd symphony. Thanks.

Really impressed by the Piano Quintet (Naxos); can't stand the SQs...

[snyprrr]

Really impressed by the Piano Quintet (Naxos); can't stand the SQs...

really?

[Karl Henning]

What don't you like about the quartets?

[snyprrr]

What don't you like about the quartets?

I only have a cd by the wonderful Mendelssohn Quartet, which includes Op. 26 and Op.70. The former was written right after WWI, and, admittedly, has a hysterical atonality about that I just find grating. It's as if 'A Survivor from Warsaw' was expanded to a full time. I exaggerate, but, I've tried them a FEW times, each time with an open mind (since I thankfully forget the details), but each time I'm greeted with the same stuff.

Next to really really boring music from the 1860s, this hysterical Expressionism is some of my least least favorite music. I have a mental block against the word 'screech'. And, I guess, when Toch calls it 'String Quartet in C Major', haha, well, I mean, couldn't he have 'labeled' it 'Db minor' just so we could, by glancing, be intrigued by the 'psychologically disturbed' key (I'm being cheeky, but, WHO writes in Db minor?). As such, I'm sure it's the most wretched 'C Major' ever, haha,... DO COMPARE with Pfitzner's SQ No.2 in C Major from a few years after. This I consider a Masterpiece (the basis for Pfitzner's Symphony in C).

Anyhow, do you have the Toch SQs? (CPO) I think there are 13, but, the numbering of them is whack (if you think Taneyev's are confusing!?!). I'd be more than willing to try what someone considered the best of the bunch (unless of course they are 26 or 70). I don't think I can fault the Mendelssohn Quartet, they play with all the hysterical passion this music requires. Now I've said hysterical 4 times!!

However, I do love the Piano Quintet. Perfect music.

[Karl Henning]

. . . It's as if 'A Survivor from Warsaw' was expanded to a full time.

Sounds like something I would enjoy. I've not yet sought out the quartets, nor the quintet. Not surprisingly, you've piqued my curiosity.

[jlaurson]

If anyone could recommend the best Krenek?...

excerpts from Chasing Heidi: Ernst Toch – The Composer and His Chamber Music


Toch went back to Mannheim after the war, but his tone had changed. After composing very little for five years, he premiered his Ninth String Quartet op.26 which received a baffled response from the 1919 Mannheim audience. Modern ears might still find it a quintessentially romantic, even jolly work—certainly no more challenging to the ears than Anton Webern's Langsamer Satz (1905) and considerably less so than Alban Berg's Piano Sonata opus 1 (1910)—but by now Toch was very comfortable with dissonance which he continued to explore in his 1920 String Quartet No.10, op.28. The trajectory is there, but listening to either of those works there is no telling that Toch would yet become one of the faces of modern German music, starting with his first participation at the Donaueschingen Chamber Music Days.

Two chamber works bracket the war years. The 1938 Piano Quintet op.64 (available on a 2008 Naxos recording performed by the Spectrum Concerts Berlin) lingers wistfully on the romantic music of his past communicated through the means of modernism that had brought him fame. From then on—movie music apart—Toch remained silent. In 1943 he wrote a letter to his composition commissioning friend Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge in which he said that "for quite some time I am not in a very happy frame of mind. Disappointments and sorrows render me frustrated and lonesome. I become somehow reluctant to go on writing if my work remains more or less paper in desks and on shelves." Unfortunately Toch had gotten between the wheels...

...His pre-penultimate String Quartet, the Twelfth, op.70, came in 1946 and marked the end of his writer's block. "Writing a string quartet was a sublime delight before the world knew the atomic bomb and—in this respect it has not changed—it still is"... The opening movement, "Calmly and evenly flowing" is a simple, continuous line with shifting pulse spread though all four instruments. The terse Adagio plays loose with atonality, the third movement, "Pensive Serenade", is a steadily chugging highlight in 18/16 among all of Toch's String Quartets. Pizzicato saturated airiness may give way to a dense moment at the center, but at least in the Verdi Quartet's interpretation (cpo 999 776) this sounds everything but pensive. The immediate eruption of the finale suggests that the fourth movement, "Vigorous", is more aptly titled and the music veers between sparse solistic phrases and orchestral textures.

In 1948 Toch was nearly felled by a stroke which led to his resignation from the music department of the University of Southern California (among his students were Vagn Holmboe and André Previn) to focus exclusively on composing and the focus of his compositions would now move to symphonies, of which he composed seven, receiving the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for his Third. Amid this symphonic frenzy and his musical realignment towards tonality falls his last string quartet, a Coleman Chamber Music Association commission from 1953. Theoretically atonal, Bach and Beethoven are recalled as Toch weaves many numerous tone rows into a double fugue, then a triple fugue. Toch sticks to 12-tone rules throughout, and even where he plays academically with tone rows like in the third movement (which he composed and added to the existing movements a few years later), there's life to this music; the second movement being downright gay and jocular. It's a far cry from the innocent sweetness of the Sixth Quartet that started his career, but throughout...

[Karl Henning]

. . . However, I do love the Piano Quintet. Perfect music.

snypsss, I truly regret that this may pain you, but . . . I bought a CD with the Quintet two years ago.

But I've not listened to it, yet.

[snyprrr]

snypsss, I truly regret that this may pain you, but . . . I bought a CD with the Quintet two years ago.

But I've not listened to it, yet.

OK, well at least it's there.

Oy, you people with jobs. You know I spent my last unemployment money on ROGER SESSIONS?!?!?! if you don't listen to the Toch before the moon becomes a hanging boob you will wake up with a craving to Compose Minimalism!!!!!!



def': 'hardcore': ...  ...

[Karl Henning]

[...] You know I spent my last unemployment money on ROGER SESSIONS?!?!?!

Best. Post. Ever.