Powerful performances of a neglected chamber composer
THE STRAD RECOMMENDS
The Strad Issue: October 2025
Description: Powerful performances of a neglected chamber composer
Musicians: Kuss Quartet, Péter Nagy (piano)
Works: Klussmann: Piano Quintet op.1; String Quartet no.1 op.7
Catalogue number: EDA RECORDS EDA 055
Ernst Gernot Klussmann (1901–75) was one of the large number of musicians who – for whatever reason – didn’t leave Germany upon the Nazis’ seizure of power and had to manage their lives to survive as best they could. Having joined the party early in 1933 in an attempt to protect his young family, he was classified as a ‘fellow traveller’ after the war, but eventually cleared of any sympathies for, let alone active support of, Nazism.
Klussmann became a respected pedagogue in his native Hamburg, but despite some early successes, his compositions haven’t had it easy: too ‘modern’ for the conservative establishment before the war, too backward-looking after it.
The Kuss Quartet makes a forceful case for Klussmann’s music in readings that are as passionate as they are perceptive, aided by a resonant recording that plays to the music’s strengths.
Klussmann wrote his Piano Quintet when he was 24, at the conclusion of his studies in Munich. It’s an exuberant piece that stretches received notions of what chamber music is supposed to be like, with the piano (Péter Nagy) at full throttle and the strings firing on all cylinders.
Just a couple of years later, the String Quartet no.1 finds the composer leaving behind those late Romantic effusions in favour of late Mahlerian – or is it early Schoenbergian? – near-atonality. It certainly makes me curious to hear what he did next.
CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE
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