If you want to stump the most seasoned pianophile in a round of “Guess the composer”, put on any of the 17 selections from this first volume devoted to Sigfrid Karg-Elert’s piano works. Ernst Breidenbach is the splendid pianist. Most people have not heard this obscure music, but in a way they have. Dohnanyi’s etudes, for instance, creep up in the more florid passages of the six Hexameron that open the disc. Play the last of the six Op. 17 Bagatelles, and you get Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s bluesy Hollywood tunes rewritten by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The treacley Arabesque whips the best and worst of Liszt into a rather delectable bon-bon. By contrast, the short and somber Schwere Düfte’s brooding Delius-like progressions make a shadowy impression. Pianist Werner Hoppstock joins Breidenbach for the four-hand Walzer-Capricien. These are the most ingenuous works so far, full of striking, quasi-modal harmonic restlessness. Lastly, the Op. 113 Partita is a rambling, 20-minute rhapsody that figuratively pores through the sketchbooks of Gershwin, Ravel, Rachmaninov, Debussy, Grieg, Prokofiev, and Vaughn Williams, mixing and matching their ideas without settling on anything definitive. Where’s Karg-Elert in mix? Nowhere to be found. CPO’s engineering is slightly brittle, but you can tame that with your home equalizer.
