Hanns Eisler Edition

This 10CD box is a tribute to the composer, revealing the enormous amount of music he wrote in a vast variety of styles, from tuneful mass songs to Schoenberg’s 12-note method. Believing as he did in the functionality of music, Eisler employed whatever idiom was appropriate to the task in hand, including drawing inspiration from jazz and popular songs and distortions of military music. Though he wrote some very large works (such as the Deutsche Sinfonie – part symphony, part cantata, part ‘German Requiem’), he was especially a master of small forms, as we see for instance in his Kleine Sinfonie, largely derived from his film music of 1930–2 (and which adheres to his credo that music can offer a new utilisation when it forges links with other artistic forms of expression). Many of his works are of course political-based, but what becomes apparent throughout listening to his oeuvre is that, while rejecting all the rhetoric of Romanticism, Eisler never lost faith in firm technique and the value of solid contrapuntal work. A wealth of talent is assembled for this album, from the first-rate German ensembles Staatskapelle Dresden and Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester to lauded artists such as the character actress Gisela May and the soprano Irmgard Arnold, who can be heard in rehearsal with the composer himself.