News

04/29/2011

Praise for Kauder music

Excerpt from an article by Michael Haas  Where to Start or How to Start? (Part II): Work Recommendations.  Published April 2011

 

Entire article can be viewed at http://orelfoundation.org/index.php/journal/journalArticle/where_to_start_or_how_to_start1/

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Far less known than Braunfels's music is the music of Hugo Kauder - a real discovery. I was present at a performance of Kauder's Trio for viola, oboe and piano (1916) at the Jewish Museum in Vienna in 2010, and I wondered how such an original and unusual composer could have remained so obscure among music lovers. His considerable output includes a number of quartets and sonatas for wind instruments. I was surprised to learn that there is a Hugo Kauder Society in the United States, and I would encourage any interested chamber music player to contact it for material (http://www.hugokauder.org). Kauder, like Pavel Haas, was a Moravian; unlike Haas (but like Mahler), he was a German-speaking Moravian, and his music has little of Haas's craggy pastoralism. Indeed, there were moments in the concert when I felt that Kauder was closer to Delius than to any Central European composer I could think of. In the 1920s and '30s Kauder was a frequent contributor to the progressive music publication Anbruch. He was also Erich Zeisl's teacher, and it was under Kauder's tutelage that Zeisl's musical language became more confidently “modern.” It came as a surprise to discover in Kauder a composer who facilitated and even encouraged an abrasive modernity in others while apparently not regularly practicing it himself.

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