Chamber Works by Frederick Block
ARC Ensemble
Chandos CHAN 20358 (shop.rcmusic.com/products/chamber-works-by-frederick-block)
After fleeing from Europe to New York City in 1940, Vienna-born Friedrich Bloch (1899-1945) resumed composing as “Frederick Block.” In the few remaining years before his death from cancer, Block busily composed many works, including three symphonies, his seventh opera and the brief, five-movement Suite, Op.73 for clarinet and piano (1944) in which jaunty playfulness alternates with wistful lyricism.
Far more substantial are three works dating from 1928-1930, filled with the lush songfulness of Viennese late-Romanticism. In the Piano Quintet, Op.19, two buoyant movements, with melodies resembling those of Erich Korngold, frame a nostalgia-perfumed slow movement. The sweet, slightly decadent sentimentality of a fin-de-siècle Viennese ballroom permeates the four lively movements of Block’s String Quartet, Op.23.
Echoes of Korngold re-emerge in the opening Andante of Block’s Piano Trio No.2, Op.26, followed by a sprightly scherzo marked Molto vivace, a ruminative Adagio and the cheerful Vivace-Tango, not only pre-dating but also, for me, more entertaining than anything by Astor Piazzolla.
This is the latest in the Music in Exile series curated by Simon Wynberg, artistic director of Toronto’s ARC Ensemble, devoted to unheralded composers displaced or suppressed by war or dictatorship. Wynberg discovered Block’s compositions while exploring archives at the New York Public Library. Thanks to him, and the ensemble’s fine musicians – violinists Erika Raum and Marie Bérard, violist Steven Dann, cellist Thomas Wiebe, clarinetist Joaquin Valdepeñas and pianist Kevin Ahfat – the music of yet another deserving composer lives again.
