Holger Speck - Ein Fest Burg - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

R. Rachmaninov - Bells & Spring Three Russian Songs [COMPACT DISCS] date 11/15/2011

While art history defines as InchÉcole de ParisInch an art-historical phenomenon, i.e. a large group of visual artists of non-French origin, many of them of Eastern European and Jewish descent, who worked in the French capital in the first decades of the twentieth century, musicology and musical life in general still find it difficult to recognize as music-historical reality an InchÈcole de ParisInch with the same complexity and seminal influence. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of it's first appearance in the musical context, the 100th anniversary of the world premiere of Strawinsky's seminal Octet and the 100th anniversary of George Antheil's arrival in Paris, the present recording takes the opportunity to scrutinize the term InchÉcole de ParisInch and to define it more clearly against the background of the enormous stylistic diversity of the various groups that came together in Paris of the1920s, their amicable interrelationships and reciprocal influences beyond the epochal break of 1939-45.

Hans Winterberg, born in Prague in 1901, studied with Alexander von Zemlinsky and Alois Haba. He worked as a conductor, pianist and composer until the annexation of the Czechoslovak Republic by Nazi Germany in 1939. As the scion of a Jewish family that had lived in Prague for centuries, he survived - after forced labor and deportation to Theresienstadt - through a series of miracles. After the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, he moved to Germany. His compositional legacy, locked away for years in a German music archive, has only been rediscovered in recent years. Winterberg combines various influences in his music to create an original and exciting personal style. He takes up stylistic elements of Janacek but is also influenced by the Second Viennese School and French Impressionism. He saw himself as a bridge-builder between the cultures of Eastern and Western Europe. Eda records dedicates a focus to this most important Czech-Jewish composers of the generation of the so called InchTerezin composersInch alongside Ullmann, Krasa and Haas. Further chamber music recordings and the complete works for piano with pianist Jonathan Powell will follow.