 Ce double album est une première qui nous fait découvrir à la fois un compositeur et un instrument dans un répertoire où il est peu présent. Ces sonates pour viole d’amour évoquent irrésistiblement, le génie en moins, le Schumann des Märchenbilder ou des Fantasiestücke ou encore le Brahms des sonates pour alto, au timbre si proche. Composées entre 1913 et 1923, elles regardent résolument vers le siècle passé à l’heure où Hindemith fait de la viole un instrument du présent. Certes, la formation de Robert Lach (1874-1958), universitaire et musicologue autrichien, ne le prédisposait guère à inventer la musique de l’avenir. Malgré sa prolixité, aucune de ses œuvres ne fut publiée en dehors de quelques lieder. C’est donc au violiste Valerio Losito que l’on doit cette découverte. Les positions antisémites de Lach, dans une Vienne prompte à renier la part honteuse de son passé, ne sont peut-être pas étrangères à cet oubli. Heureusement, sa musique ne porte aucun message si ce n’est celui de la beauté. (Yves Kerbiriou) Robert Lach (1874-1958) is another name almost lost to history and now partially rehabilitated by Brilliant Classics. At least it will now be possible to hear the creative voice of this law-student turned ethnomusicologist whose more-thancultural interest in German Nationalism produced many collections of vernacular material such as folksongs as well as a strong association with Hitler’s National Socialist Party. In fact he was a stern critic of his colleagues’ slavish attempts to link racial theory to musicology with panegyrics to Wagner and Bruckner, and his interests remained primarily academic, as attested by his painstaking work in catalogueing the collection of musical manuscripts in the National Library of Vienna. Lach’s own compositions include eight masses, ten symphonies, twenty-five string quartets and a great deal of other instrumental music, but little of his music has been published beyond his songs, a genre in which he was no less prolific. His historiographical enthusiasms may now be freshly appreciated with this new recording of the sonatas he wrote for an instrument which was long obsolete even by the late 19th-century, the viola d’amore. The instrument’s noon came in the Baroque era: Biber, Scarlatti and Vivaldi all wrote sonatas, though as late as 1756, Leopold Mozart could remark that it sounds ‘especially charming in the stillness of the evening.’ Valerio Losito has demonstrated the particular qualities of the viola d’amore on two previous Brilliant Classics releases, of solo music from the Baroque period (BC94367) and sonatas by Scarlatti (BC94242). Lach, however, was composing in a richly Romantic idiom comparable with the late music of Brahms, and his three sonatas date from 1913-22, being thus doubly archaic in style. The album is completed with nine Lyric Pieces (1920-23) which explore Romantic moods and characters, as their titles reveal (Idylle, Humoreske, Romanze, Barcarole, Elegie, Cavatine, Legende, Ballade, Gavotte).
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