The extraordinary 20th Century Austrian composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold stunned the world as a child prodigy, achieved international fame as a young man in the 1920s, emigrated to the United States after already having established himself as the father of the classic Hollywood movie soundtrack and ultimately left a small but breathtaking oeuvre of concert music. But with the radical shifts in politics, culture and taste following two world wars, the ferocity of the postwar avant-garde, and the misapplied stigma of “selling out”, Korngold’s reputation tanked. If he was not ridiculed or disdained as anachronistic or opportunistic, he was utterly forgotten as irrelevant. It was only towards the end of the 20th Century amidst a return to tonal and Neo-Romantic music, that Korngold was rediscovered, first through highlights of his magnificent film scores and then, approaching the centennial of his birth in 1997, through his “serious” instrumental music. Now well into the 21st Century, one encounters Korngold’s masterful and completely original music on concert programs again featuring, especially, a trove of outstanding chamber music. 

A 24-year-old Korngold penned his op.15 piano quintet during a high point in his early career: 1920 saw the premiere of his most famous opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) that became one of the most popular internationally staged operas of the 1920s. After working on a big theatrical work, Korngold would often relax by composing chamber music and he started at once with the first of three string quartets (to be completed a few years hence) as well as the piano quintet (which he completed first, in 1921, and successfully premiered as the pianist in 1923). It is a perfect showcase for Korngold’s literally fantastic music, a unique, nearly unclassifiable style characterized nonetheless by trademark features. 

With the opening bars of the first movement, we hear Korngold’s grand late-Romantic style, lush, lyrical and almost always tonal. But soon and essentially throughout, he defies convention and expectation, surprising with daring harmonies, modulations (key changes), chromaticism (the smallest intervals more granular than melody) and dissonance. The emotional range within a single movement is astonishingly vast as is the ever-shifting texture including individual and composite sonorities redefining the “sound” of the piano quintet right before our very ears. The music teems with a wealth of themes, motives with a density of invention that nearly overwhelms as it delights. But this is not mere fantasy or pastiche: an heir of the Viennese masters, Korngold generates his musical fabric from a small set of motifs made rich through constant variation. It is an epic journey between the first sweep of the main theme and its symmetrical echo towards the end with a myriad of permutations along the way.