Almost but not quite unbearable, Ernst Krenek's nine-continuous-movements Symphony No. 1 of 1921 sounds like Beethoven's String Quartet in C sharp minor, Op. 131, run through a meat grinder, packed in a casing of gelatinous expressionism and orchestrated by a close student of the scores of
Strauss and Schreker. And in addition to being a wise-guy, that was exactly what the 21-year-old Krenek was. The tough guy posturing, the melodramatic passion, the "I'm the smartest guy in the room" rhetoric: it's all so adolescent. Despite his undeniable brilliance as a composer, Krenek's Symphony No. 1 is a headache for most of its interminable length.
Apparently, it was all too much for
Takao Ukigaya and the Radio-Philharmonie Hannover des NDR because they sound just about done in by the end of the eighth movement's eight-minute fugue. Nor do they do much better with Krenek's five-movement Symphony No. 5, Op. 119. Built along the same line of the nearly contemporaneous Piano Sonata No. 4, Op. 114, from 1948, Krenek's Fifth starts with a starkly modernist "Introduktion" and ends with an abrasive, aggressive, asymmetrical, and atonal Fugue. And it's still all too much for
Ukigaya and the RPOH des NDR, which starts slipping and sliding about one minute into the two-minute "Introduktion" and never really recovers its footing. CPO's 1994 sound is glassy and hard.