Karol Rathaus (arr. Adam Cigman-Mark)

Andante con moto

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Sara Trickey Violin

Adam Cigman-Mark Piano

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This is the slow movement from an orchestral suite (op. 29), which I arranged in 2016/17 as a duo for violin and piano.

 

Rathaus composed this piece for the 1930 ISCM Festival, when he was regarded as one of the promising young composers in Berlin. The Nazi takeover in 1933 decimated his career, and he has not yet been afforded the chance of rehabilitation offered to the other suppressed composers of his stature. This work is one of its composer's finest achievements, fusing late Romantic rhetoric with acidic Neue Sachlichkeit harmony into a wholly individual style. Its slow movement - a devastating threnody in the line of Mahler and Berg - seemed to me perfectly suited to a small-scale reimagining.

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In the interests of creating an idiomatic duo piece, I have done some light compositional retouching. On the whole, however, it was striking how naturally the music took to rearrangement; Rathaus was particularly drawn to composing for violin and piano (there are two sonatas, and a number of shorter works) - and several of his orchestral works manage to suggest the colour and character of solo string lines even in their most fulsome outbursts.

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More recordings coming soon...