World premiere recording: The Kuss Quartet champions long overlooked artist (E.G. Klussmann)
With its new album, the Kuss Quartet presents a portrait of Ernst Gernot Klussmann (1901–1975), a German artist of the “war generation” whose work was dismissed due to his continuous involvement in the Third Reich. With world premiere recordings of two chamber music works from the 1920s, the Berlin ensemble, known for its spirit of discovery, together with pianist Péter Nagy, now proves that a once talented composer enriched the gilded world of the Golden Twenties with a highly original voice.
For decades, Germany’s attempt to process and come to terms with the Third Reich meant that personalities and functionaries of the cultural scene of the time who were not persecuted, exiled, imprisoned, or even killed, but instead kept their teaching, research, and musical practice going in the country, were placed under general suspicion (with a few famous and astonishing exceptions: one need only think of Herbert von Karajan, who joined the Nazi Party twice). For the sake of simplicity, both person and work were often considered ostracized across the board. Eighty years after the end of the war, it is now time to re-examine, re-evaluate, or even rehabilitate these individual artists’ biographies and their legacies. And in doing so, surprising and fascinating sound worlds are opening up in the comprehensive search for a path from late Romanticism to New Music – as in the case of Ernst Gernot Klussmann (1901–1975).
Born in the German Empire, raised in the Weimar Republic, followed by a career of composing and teaching during the Nazi and West German eras, the Hamburg native could not have wished for a better advocate for his chamber music oeuvre than the Kuss Quartet. The fact that Ernst Gernot Klussmann has now become the focus of the quartet members Jana Kuss (vl.), Oliver Wille (vl.), William Coleman (v.) and Mikayel Hakhnazaryan (vc.) is due to several reasons: first and foremost is the research work of Dr. Carsten Bock, who published the first sheet music editions with Jaron Verlag, thanks to funding from the Funk Foundation. More recently, the 75th anniversary of the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre put a spotlight on the composer, since Klussman was one of its co-founders.
The chamber music by Klussmann, presented here as a world premiere recording by the Kuss Quartet, dates from the 1920s—and thus from an early phase of his compositional development. This new CD, with its “highly complex and at the same time highly emotional music beyond the trends of the 1920s” (F. Hardens-Withenow), provides valuable, contemporary pieces for this artistically polyphonic era – and sketches the picture of a young composer for whom the course of time ultimately denied a great career.
