 Le label CPO, bien connu pour ses investigations pointues, offre ici une superbe doublette de compositeurs néo-classiques. Allemand d'origine catalane né en France, grand pédagogue, Philipp Jarnach reste surtout connu pour avoir achevé l'opéra de son ami Ferruccio Busoni, "Doktor Faust". De neuf ans son cadet, le Polonais Szymon Laks fait aussi ses armes à Paris, celui des Années Folles et de leur bouillonnement. Juif, il a le malheur d'être déporté à Auschwitz, ce qui le rattache, volens nolens, à l' "Entartete Muzik". Chef de l'orchestre de ce camp, il survit toutefois, et reprend plus tard (sporadiquement) l'écriture. Farouchement tonales, Sinfonietta et Sinfonie pour cordes font contraste : la seconde, qui pourrait être l'épitaphe d'Hindemith, est beaucoup plus sombre que la première, de vingt-huit ans antérieure, vaguement héritière du Prokofiev de la Symphonie Classique. La "Muzik zum Gedächtnis der Einsamen" de Jarnach - originellement un quatuor à cordes - sonne telle une inquiétante procession, aux accents parfois chostakoviens. L'orchestre Leopoldinum de Wroclaw et son chef allemand Hartmut Rohde livrent une interprétation d'une grande tension, aux plans nets et coupants, et d'une forte charge émotionnelle que sert une prise de son de toute beauté. (Jacques Duffourg-Müller) Hartmut Rohde became the new artistic director and conductor of the Leopoldinum Chamber Orchestra of Wroc³aw (Breslau) at the beginning of the 2014/15 season. Their debut CD featuring symphonic works by Simon Laks and Philipp Jarnach is now being released on cpo. The decision to combine these two composers may seem to be quite arbitrary, and at first glance their origins and musical impulses seem to be very different. »On a second look, however, interesting parallels come into view and make their joint presentation appear to make very good sense. Both grew up during a period of dramatic historical change prior to World War I and enjoyed promising career beginnings in the 1920s, which many important performances document for Simon Laks in France and for Philipp Jarnach in Germany. Both experienced the establishment of dodecaphony, its expansion into serial music, and the first experiments in the field of electronic music. However, both also had in common a strong commitment to the preservation of traditional tonal language. As moderate moderns they firmly believed in the viability and expandability of musical principles that had developed over the centuries and above all in the irrevocability of tonality as the animating and energizing source constituting the substrate of musical design. Moreover, these principles included homophony and polyphony beginning with the seventeenth century, the rhetorical doctrine of the affections, the flow of melos, and the spirit of the historically transmitted compositional genres. Their music is highly emotional, crafted with supreme skill, rich in associations, and fascinatingly diverse in expression« (Hartmut Rohde).
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