Tonya Lemoh Plays Joseph Marx (2008)

Pianist Tonya Lemoh, of Australian and Sierra Leonean background, has worked in Germany and Denmark. This, her debut recording, unearths the music of an almost forgotten Austrian composer, Joseph Marx; it includes several world-premiere recordings, from scores provided to Lemoh by Marx's descendants. The music is a worthwhile find. Marx was a contemporary of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, and thanks to the conservatism of his music he was also their nemesis. In the post-World War II rush to embrace the music that fascism had ... Read More

Pianist Tonya Lemoh, of Australian and Sierra Leonean background, has worked in Germany and Denmark. This, her debut recording, unearths the music of an almost forgotten Austrian composer, Joseph Marx; it includes several world-premiere recordings, from scores provided to Lemoh by Marx's descendants. The music is a worthwhile find. Marx was a contemporary of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, and thanks to the conservatism of his music he was also their nemesis. In the post-World War II rush to embrace the music that fascism had attacked, Marx, who rode out the war as a music professor in Vienna, was forgotten. But his music, though conservative, was in no way derivative, and Lemoh gives us an intriguing sampling. Marx has been called a Romantic Impressionist, but that gives a mistaken impression; the sharp formal boundary lines in his music owe nothing to Debussy and his successors. What's superficially impressionistic about his music are the highly chromatic harmonies, but however dense they become they... Read Less