Glenn Gould; Heinrich Kaminski: String Quartets

Description

Outwardly there are no similarities between Glenn Gould (1932-1982) and Heinrich Kaminski (1886-1946). In fact, however, many lines of connection can be discovered beneath the surface, which form the concept of the present album. First of all, we observe in the Canadian exceptional pianist the same creative seriousness that the German post-Romanticist displayed. In this regard, Gould's singular Opus 1, despite its compositional rigor and the fascination that serial music held for the mid-twenties pianist at the time, has become an indulgent building in a movement that moves "against the grain" back into the same sonic world previously inhabited by such figures as Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. This period was also home to the pronounced individualist Kaminski, to whom any frivolity was alien, because he always felt composing to be a spiritual act of creation. Something of the incessant search for the secrets of the tonal universe can already be sensed in the classical four-movement String Quartet in F major of 1913, with which the end of the apprenticeship years had come: large formats up to the drama would follow, but also "small" scores such as the Quartet Variations on the Name ABEGG (1931), all of which Kaminski "conquered" to a certain extent in the course of his life. It is an exhausting path. Those who are able to walk it fully are rewarded by the joy of creation. Glenn Gould, after a promising attempt, deprived himself of this joy. He found another in others.