Schoenberg String Trio; Regamey Quintet – Finely graded performances pack a punch

This album connects the well-known Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg and the little-known Swiss composer Constantin Regamey through works they wrote in a time of great stress in the 1940s.

Schoenberg suffered a heart attack and was revived only by an injection into the heart. The experience, sometimes very explicitly, informs the String Trio he began even before his discharge from hospital. Regamey, born in Kyiv to a Russian mother and a Swiss father, moved to Warsaw in his teens and, having trained as a linguist, became active as a self-taught composer.

He composed his 1944 Quintet for clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello and piano at a time when he used his linguistic skills and his Swiss passport to further Poland’s war effort. He made money as a pianist in a cafe (where, given wartime destruction and the lack of coal, people went to stay warm) and even sold padlocks. He wrote about the time, saying, “An artist, living constantly in such proximity to death and always aware that this piece could be his last and perhaps even the only one that might survive, feels that he must express everything in this one work.”

Both pieces use Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique, Regamey in a freer and looser, polyglot way. Each packs quite a punch in these finely graded performances.