There are composers whose names survive through the teaching circuit, while their actual artistic weight gets lost along the way. Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877-1933) is a textbook example of this. Every flute student struggles through the 30 Caprices at some point, plays the Sinfonische Kanzone as mandatory exam work or ventures into the Sonata Appassionata. But how often are these works truly listened to as fully-fledged concert music? This very gap between pedagogical omnipresence and artistic marginalization forms the starting point of this new release from Da Vinci Classics, on which the Casale-Rouxel Duo – flutist Samuel Casale and pianist Arzhel Rouxel – brings together Karg-Elert's complete flute oeuvre.
To appreciate this undertaking properly, one must first understand how isolated Karg-Elert's position actually was within the German fin de siècle. Born in Oberndorf am Neckar, contemporary of Richard Strauss, Max Reger and Franz Schreker, trained as a pianist – and yet never truly fitting into any school or movement. His idiom, influenced by France, was moreover sensitive in the German musical climate of his time, which had little patience for that international orientation; outside Germany, particularly in the United Kingdom, his work actually received recognition. After World War II he faded into the background for a while, until a revival from the late seventies brought him back into focus – though that remained largely confined to his organ works.
Where Richard Strauss unfolds his musical narratives slowly, Karg-Elert seems to constantly surprise the listener with new angles of approach. His music moves erratically, full of unexpected turns and sudden flashes of colour. In doing so, he opts less for monumental architecture than for a continuous stream of new ideas, which gives his music a striking liveliness. Those who know Karg-Elert only from the teaching circuit will moreover be surprised by how much lyrical warmth, colourful harmonies and refined tonal shadings lie behind these scores. What sounded idiosyncratic a century ago sounds remarkably fresh today.
An intriguing thread in Casale's accompanying essay is the connection he draws with Nietzsche's cultural criticism. His plea for French clarity against Wilhelmine heaviness would, according to Casale, also be musically recognizable in Karg-Elert's desire to break free from academic conventions. Whether this parallel holds up completely musicologically is difficult to prove, but as an interpretive key it works surprisingly convincingly. It helps understand this music as an art of continuous change, in which contrast is not an interruption of form but its essential motor. The essay moreover testifies to thorough knowledge of Karg-Elert's oeuvre and to a remarkably critical, thoughtful approach to interpretation. At the same time, it offers a fascinating insight into the working method of the duo and gives the choices made during this recording extra relief. Not by chance does the album bear the title Equinoxes: the moment when light and darkness hold each other in balance. This metaphor aptly summarizes what this music and this interpretation are all about: a continuous interplay of opposites that do not cancel each other out, but rather reinforce each other.
This vision also determines the interpretation of the Casale-Rouxel Duo. According to the booklet, Karg-Elert's many character markings – blühend, duftend, bleich – are not understood as mere atmospheric suggestions, but as the starting point of musical imagination. Tempo flows from character, not the other way around; tone colour emerges from a shared dramaturgy between the two musicians. This is an approach that aligns well with their experience with contemporary music, where abrupt transitions and an elastic sense of time are more rule than exception.
Fortunately, this vision remains not confined to theory. This becomes clear from the very first measures of Impressions exotiques, with which the first CD immediately sets the tone. Before the listener fully grasps Karg-Elert's idiosyncratic musical language, this music already sweeps him along into a colourful sonic universe that arouses curiosity for everything that follows. Samuel Casale possesses a full, flexible tone that effortlessly shifts between lyrical warmth and sharp profiling. From one work to the next, his tone colour shifts almost imperceptibly, always entirely in service of Karg-Elert's widely varying musical worlds. Even in the most technically demanding passages – the sharp register jumps from the Caprices, the rushed runs in the Sinfonische Kanzone – his singing line remains intact, as if technical mastery were never an end in itself for him, but a self-evident means of letting the music speak freely.
Arzhel Rouxel meanwhile proves himself an equal partner. His piano playing possesses refined musicality and great sensitivity to colour and balance. Although he constantly supports the flute, he remains far more than a mere accompanist. He gives the piano part its own voice, without ever disturbing the careful balance within the duo. His playing lends structure to Karg-Elert's sometimes capricious musical thought and ensures that the many harmonic colours never dissolve into diffuse sound masses. Particularly in the quieter moments, the duo demonstrates how self-evidently lyric and tension can coexist here. The recording quality too deserves compliment: transparent, spatial and with enough detail to allow the often complex textures to speak clearly. This makes this extensive release engaging from beginning to end: each work reveals a new colour, a new character and a new facet of a composer who proves to be far more versatile than his reputation suggests.
This becomes particularly clear in the integrally recorded 30 Caprices. Where this cycle is usually regarded as a collection of technical studies, Casale treats each caprice as an independent character piece. Register changes, articulation problems and virtuosic runs fade into the background in favour of musical profile. This creates a surprisingly varied cycle in which each miniature acquires its own psychological colour. You thus no longer listen to thirty technical studies, but to thirty character pieces each with their own voice.
A similar balance between mastery and expression characterizes the Sonata Appassionata. The composer continuously balances here on the boundary between passion and formal control, a tension field that the performers carefully keep intact without falling into sentimentality or detached control. The programmatic works too, such as Impressions exotiques and Suite pointillistique, are nowhere reduced to musical illustrations. Behind the exotic titles unfolds a continuously transforming soundscape in which colour is at least as important as melody.
The question remains whether this integral recording will definitively rehabilitate Karg-Elert. A successful CD alone is not enough to give a composer a permanent place on concert platforms again. For that, his musical language may remain too idiosyncratic and too difficult to fit into familiar historical boxes. But precisely for this reason is this release so valuable. It invites us to listen again to a composer who proves to be far more than the author of a handful of mandatory exam pieces. Not every rediscovery rewrites music history, but some do correct our listening memory. This integral unquestionably belongs to that latter category.