 Cinq partitions ! C’est tout ce qui subsiste de l’œuvre du compositeur juif polonais Joachim Mendelson (1892-1943)… En publiant ces pages, l’éditeur français Max Eschig ne se doutait probablement pas qu’il sauvait de la destruction barbare une fraction du précieux héritage d’un musicien interné et assassiné dans le ghetto de Varsovie, la folie meurtrière nazie s’acharnant non seulement à exterminer physiquement la communauté juive, mais également sa pensée et sa création artistique. À Paris, Mendelson fut membre de l’Association des Jeunes Musiciens Polonais, côtoyant des personnalités telles que Karol Szymanowski, Alexandre Tansman, Arthur Rubinstein, pour ne citer que les plus connus, ce qui éveilla effectivement l’intérêt de l’éditeur Max Eschig. Le disque sous rubrique, tout simplement admirable, nous révèle en première mondiale quatre des cinq œuvres miraculeusement rescapées, datant de la fin des années 30 (la cinquième, un Quatuor à cordes n°1 de 1925, est également disponible chez le même label EDA34). Les musiciens polonais, français, allemands de ce disque se sont totalement investis pour nous offrir de vibrantes interprétations d’une musique qui, comme celles de beaucoup de compositeurs polonais de ce temps, avait énormément à nous offrir. Ce CD, coproduction de la Radio Berlin Brandebourg et la Radio polonaise, est particulièrement émouvant et symbolique : une manière de réparation qui s’imposait, et un devoir de mémoire obligatoire et indispensable. (Michel Tibbaut) With the homage to Joachim Mendelson, eda records continues its survey of Poland’s rich musical heritage of the first half of the twentieth century, a heritage that – as a result of the devastating consequences of the expulsion and extermination of the European Jews after 1933, the destruction of Polish musical life following the occupation of Poland in September 1939, and the policy of suppression during the communist era – was obliterated from music-historical consciousness. The monographic series en hommage appears as a supplement to eda records’ meanwhile six-part Poland Abroad series with first recordings of works by important Polish composers who almost all shared the fate of persecution and exile. Joachim Mendelson was born in Warsaw in 1892, and studied composition in his hometown and in Berlin. Like nearly all Polish composers of his generation, he went to Paris in the 1920s, where he joined the Association des Jeunes Musiciens Polonais, in which Poland’s entire musical elite gradually came together and, under the patronage of Karol Szymanowski, Arthur Rubinstein, Serge Koussevitzky, Maurice Ravel, and Nadia Boulanger, enriched the musical life of the metropolis on the Seine with extremely interesting colours. In the middle of the 1930s, Mendelson accepted a professorship at the Warsaw College of Music. After Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, he was interned in the Warsaw ghetto, where he was murdered in 1943. Merely five compositions from Mendelson’s pen have been preserved in editions issued by the Parisian music publisher Max Eschig. In the works of the late 1930s recorded here for the first time, Mendelson finds his way to a classicism of synthesis that can integrate the refinement of French “impressionism” as well as Mahler’s Weltschmerz and Strauss’s emphatic style, the austere, rhythmically pointed inflection of the “New Objectivity” as well as the dance-like soulfulness of Slavic provenance. Mendelson’s String Quartet, his earliest preserved work, was already recorded for eda records by the Silesian String Quartet (EDA 35). Musicians from the three countries that marked the axis of Mendelson’s life – Poland, Germany, France – perform together on this CD, which was coproduced by Radio Berlin Brandenburg and Polish Radio.
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