FROM VIENNA WITH LOVE (2011)
for violin, viola, violoncello & piano
Doblinger Music Publishers (catalogue #07 249)
09/16/2011 at the New York Chamber Music Festival in New York City, NY by the New York Piano Quartet
Gernot Wolfgang, VIENNA AND THE WEST (2019), Albany Records CD TROY 1760
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DOWNLOAD PROGRAM NOTES (English)
DOWNLOAD PROGRAM NOTES (German)
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More information about the recording of From Vienna With Love on the album VIENNA AND THE WEST
More information about the recording of From Vienna With Love
on the album SONGS FOR MAHLER IN THE ABSENCE OF WORDS
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Purchase the sheet music for From Vienna With Love at:
Theodore Front Musical Literature
sheetmusicplus.com
Reviews:
“The album ends with the beautiful, Mahler-inspired “From Vienna with Love”. Touching on the brilliance of early 20th-century Austrian composition, the exciting influences of Eastern European music on Vienna, and the American jazz that has so influenced the composer, this piece serves as the perfect conclusion to a musical testament to the greatness that is Gernot Wolfgang.”
Jeffrey Palmer, CutCommon
“In the piano quartet, From Vienna With Love (2011) Wolfgang takes his inspiration from a theme in a Mahler piano quartet. Here we also get that sense of the early 20th-Century dissonance coupled with the lyrical style of Mahler’s music with its long line. Most interesting is the shift into the asymmetrical meters after the introduction which helps propel the music forward quite well. Jazz inflections also become part of the fabric of this fascinating work that makes for a perfect encore to the preceding pieces and closes off the album”
Steven Kennedy, Cinemusical
“Gernot Wolfgang’s From Vienna with Love sounds like a Schlagobers moment, and it’s anything but. It’s the Second Viennese School by way of jazz, or perhaps vice versa. It incorporates some fluid, evocative harmonies, carrying the listener along on its sheer drive and inner logic.”
Stephen Francis Vasta, Musicweb-International
“The program concludes with a clever and touching piano quartet, From Vienna With Love, which is based on a theme from a sketch Gustav Mahler made for his Piano Quartet of 1876. There’s a real tango feel to the piece, with contrasting aggressive and sentimental themes, though the folkloric content is Eastern European rather than Latin. Once again jazz-inflected passages alternate with more erudite ones, but in this piece especially Wolfgang achieves a real synthesis, I think. It’s a great end to a stimulating, and fun, album of music.”
Dean Frey, Music for Several Instruments
“We finish our musical journey with From Vienna With Love for piano quartet. This is a largely tonal work that begins with a lovely slow passage before moving into a much jazzier theme in an uneven meter that almost sounds like something Dave Brubeck would have thought up.”
Lynn René Bayley, The Art Music Lounge
“The album ends with “From Vienna with Love” for piano quartet which takes Mahler’s two-page sketch for the intended second movement of his 1876 Piano Quartet and runs with it. Viennese idioms coalesce with Austro-Hungarian rhythmic affiliations before the music expands to include jazz elements at mid-point. The finish is lusty.”
Jonathan Woolf, Musicweb-International