Leo Ornstein: Complete Works for Cello and Piano (2007)

Leo Ornstein For Cello And Piano

Leo Ornstein (1893 - 2001) was a child prodigy as a pianist. His family fled the Russian Pogroms and moved to New York City in 1906. From 1915 to the mid-1920s, Ornstein enjoyed a flamboyant and successful career as a concert pianist. He was also in the vanguard of the new modernistic style of composition with his iconoclastic, dissonant, atonal piano music. Ornstein withdrew from public life in the mid-1920s for reasons that remain obscure, but he continued to compose. His compositions gradually lost their modernistic edge as Ornstein became critical of what he perceived as the cerebral unemotional style of the modernist movement. In the 1960s, those who remembered Ornstein at all assumed that he had died. In the 1970s, a small revival of interest in Ornstein and his music began which continues today. In 2007, scholars Michael Broyles and Denise Von Glahn published the first full-length biography of Ornstein: "Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices."

Ornstein had a great gift in composing for the cello. His small collection of works for cello and piano use the resources of the instrument in strongly emotional music of sadness, song and lament. In much of his writing for cello, Ornstein captures the Jewish-Russian music that he heard as a boy. In 2007, cellist Joshua Gordon and pianist Randall Hodgkinson recorded this CD on New World Records of Ornstein's complete works for cello and piano. Broyles and Von Glahn, the authors of the Ornstein biography, wrote the liner notes. Of the five works on this CD, two of them, the Six Preludes for Cello and Piano and the Sonata No. 1 for cello and piano are among Ornstein's better-known compositions and have been recorded earlier. The three remaining works on the CD receive their world-premier recordings. This music for the most part belies Ornstein's early reputation as a modernist. The works are dissonant but speak in the voice of immediacy and feeling.

Ornstein's "Six Preludes for cello and piano" dates from 1929-1930. This collection of six short, taut movements features great interplay between the instruments. The work opens with a short movement marked "moderato sostenuto" in which the cello and piano develop short phrases in dialogue. In the following "con moto", the cello states a plaintive theme to the accompaniment of a light piano figuration up and down the keyboard. The movement grows in intensity and ruggedness to a climactic passage featuring large piano chords. It concludes with a sudden soft passage in the cello. The third movement is a Mendelssonian scherzo with highly modern dissonances. The cello generally provides the theme and the piano the dissonant accompaniment. The fourth and fifth preludes are interrelated slow movements, with the fourth movement mournful and introspective and the fifth movement more improvisatory with a fluttering piano part above the cello. The final prelude is rhythmic, strongly accentuated, and dissonant that works to an urgent close. This finale justifies Ornstein's early modernistic reputation as a "wild man" of music.

Ornstein composed his four-movement sonata no. 1 for cello and piano, op. 52 in 1915, but the work is tonal in character. The first movement, "allegro appassionata" is an almost traditional sonata form with a brusque opening theme contrasting with a lyrical second theme, followed by a jagged development. It features virtuosic writing in the piano accompaniment. The second movement consists of a sad and intense song, stated in a long theme in the cello. Broyles and Von Glahn note that this movement captures "the cry and wail of the young Jew in the New World." The third movement is a scherzo in which the swirling outer sections contrast with a passionate trio in a slower tempo. The extended finale begins with a flowing theme which changes in tempo and intensity as the movement progresses, including a long passage of blocked chords for the piano near the conclusion.

Ornstein wrote a second sonata for cello and piano which receives its premier recording here. This work is in a single movement of about 15 minutes and it features a long, lyrical theme for the cello interspersed with an extended solo piano passage. In its emotional character, this work is a worthy companion to the first sonata and the preludes. In its intensity and in its improvisatory character, this work is more of a rhapsody than a sonata. It is easy to overlook the somewhat diffuse, repetitive character of this work and to melt into its lyricism and its expressiveness.

The final two works on the CD are a seven minute "Composition 1 for cello and piano," with much of the feel of the longer compositions, and the fragmentary "Two Pieces for cello and piano, op. 33.

Ornstein's works for cello and piano are beautiful and moving. Ornstein is a composer who will probably never be widely recognized. But I have responded to his music. It has found a place in my heart.

Robin Friedman