Bryan over at The Shellackophile recently posted the premiere recording of Toch's Piano Quintet so I thought I'd add by "toch" cents and offer up this Alco recording of Toch's "The Chinese Flute" for soprano and orchestra.
As the years have gone by, Toch's star has definitely lowered in the skies. Once considered one of the preeminent avant garde composers of his generation, his career definitely stalled after being forced to flee Germany as the Nazi's came to power. In the United States, where he finally settled, his music was met with ambivalence, possibly because his creative style was geared toward 1920's Germany and not the cinematic world of 1930's and 40's Hollywood. Whatever the case, Toch was unable to sustain his reputation like compatriot Paul Hindemith as the years progressed.
I'm not sure how to describe this work from 1923, The Chinese Flute. Perhaps a chamber opera or a cantata? A song cycle, a symphony? You got me. What I can say is that Mahler utilized the same collection of texts for Das Lied von der Erde and achieved a masterpiece while Toch produces a bit of a oddball piece with its dense chromatic writing and weak connection between the text and the music. Worth a listen yet hardly memorable. Rather, this is a document of the experimental years of between the wars Germany.
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