Gottfried von Einem was a major mover in Viennese musical life after World War II. A prolific composer whose efforts went mainly into the field of opera, von Einem's tart, highly expressive idiom, informed by neo-classicism and jazz, continued unchanged from the 1940s until 1996 when he died, as though contemporary trends toward academic serialism and aleatoric procedures didn't exist. Pressed about this issue, von Einem stated, "I have no other talent than to use sounds and tones to translate into reality what I want to express." On this disc, ORF Edition presents a smartly chosen cross section of von Einem's output for piano as played by young Austrian pianist Robert Lehrbaumer. Lehrbaumer has a strong grasp of von Einem's keyboard idiom, which generally avoids thick textures and, particularly in his late music, is sometimes pared down to a single line of argument, albeit spread widely across the keyboard.
Of particular interest is the Seven Portraits (1995), musical thumbnail sketches of persons close to von Einem, including his teacher Boris Blacher, recalled in a flittering, highly jazzy piece, and Bertolt Brecht, remembered in a turbulent, trill-laden movement that almost sounds like a twisted recasting of something out of Jan Ladislav Dussek. Von Einem maintained strong musical links with the past, and yet his eccentric, oblique music is so different from that of anyone else in his particular time frame one is tempted to consider it as the mainstream classical piano music of an alternate universe. Von Einem demonstrates a high level of craftsmanship and delights in mixing up oddball combinations of familiar-sounding elements, and these help make his music sound a little fresher in the twenty first century than perhaps it did in the twentieth. Lehrbaumer's playing of von Einem is brilliant and sharp as a tack, and overall ORF Edition's Gottfried von Einem: Die Solo-Klavierwerke is a far more approachable vehicle to evaluate this important composer than would be diving into one of his operas.
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