Ardent advocacy makes the case for a forgotten figure
The Strad Issue: November 2024
Description: Ardent advocacy makes the case for a forgotten figure
Musicians: ARC Ensemble
Works: Block: Piano Trio no.2; String Quartet; Piano Quintet; Suite for clarinet and piano
Catalogue number: Chandos CHAN20358
Who, you may well ask, is Frederick Block? Well, he is presented here as yet another neglected displaced composer, escaping the clutches of the Gestapo in Vienna, and eventually ending up in New York. Like many émigrés, he experienced survivors’ guilt and a sense of being a foreigner, none of which helped embed him into the American musical establishment. Yet in Vienna, before the Anschluss, he had begun to cut a dash, with several of his works being broadcast on the radio. Counter-factual history might ask what would have happened had he stayed? His style is approachably tonal, his writing and training conservative, so he was perhaps out of kilter with the modernist sensibility of the time.
Yet his music is extremely well crafted, and offers striking ideas that are well developed, but never meandering. I was pleasantly surprised by how effective Block’s music is, particularly the Piano Trio no.2. Without doubt, having the ARC Ensemble as an advocate is a wonderful boost, its players characterising the music lucidly yet with great tonal and dynamic colour. The String Quartet offers a similar pithiness of ideas and contrasts of mood, again admirably depicted, in the fin-de-siècle style of ‘comfortable chromaticism’. Clearly it is time for a re-evaluation of Block’s music.
JOANNE TALBOT
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