Eisler: Kleine Sinfonie

Day 241

Hans Eisler: Kleine Sinfonie

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Ivan Volkov

Eisler’s complex person journey is a sober reflection on the impact of world events in the 20th century. He was born into a secular Jewish family and fought for Germany in the first war. But he went into exile when the Nazis came to power and spent a few itinerant years in various European countries before emigrating to the USA. But after the war he fell foul of the Macarthyism and was denounced as the Karl Marx of music and suspected of being a Soviet spy. He was deported and ended up in East Germany, where he wrote the national anthem and was involved in political theatre. 

The Kleine Sinfonie is a comparatively early work (1931) and the composer described working on it as giving him a rest from more serious projects. It used material from some of the stage works he had been writing at the time. It it is a bracing energetic style with overtones of Jazz and popular music - saxophones to the fore. Its quite raucous at times, thought here are some more relaxed melodic passages. I enjoyed it - it was not too taxing on the ear and was short enough not to get boring. It was perhaps a little less agit prop that I was expecting but at this stage Eisler was not yet aware of the massive political currents that would effect his composition outlook in the years to come.