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In addition to the Piano Concerto No. 1 and the Suite for Viola and Piano, this unusually scored Concertino is one of the earliest works that Winterberg composed after moving from Prague to Munich in 1947. In that year, Fritz Rieger, his old fellow student in Zemlinsky's conducting class, had premiered Winterberg's First Symphony, written in Prague in 1934/35, in Mannheim – it was the most important performance of one of the composer's works to date, and Winterberg could not only hope a new beginning after "Zero Hour", but also for the real start of a career that had been denied in Prague from 1939 due to persecution and imprisonment on account of his Jewish origins. In contrast to important symphonic works, three piano concertos and string quartets, which were premiered and broadcast in Munich from 1950, Winterberg's chamber music for wind instruments - among thiem the Concertino - remained unperformed and unpublished during the composer's lifetime. With its rhythmic splendor, its unshakeable "Élan vital" and the humorous play with the eccentric combination of instruments, the piece seems like a reminder of the lost world of Dadaist surrealism in Prague between the wars.
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Turning Points - Episode 2: Hans Winterberg
Turning Points - Episode 2: Hans Winterberg
Turning Points - Episode 2: Hans Winterberg
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Hans Winterberg, born in 1901 into a Jewish family that had lived in Prague for centuries, studied with Alexander von Zemlinsky and Alois Hába. Until the annexation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany in 1939, he worked as a conductor, pianist, and composer. Unlike his friends and colleagues Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, and Gideon Klein, he survived the Shoah through a series of miracles. In 1945, he moved to Munich, where he began a promising second career. As a representative of a moderate avant-garde, he found himself increasingly marginalized from the late 1960s onwards. After his death in 1991, his artistic estate was locked away in a German music archive and, since none of his works had been published during his lifetime, he was forgotten. Since 2023, Boosey & Hawkes has been publishing Winterberg's chamber music in an extraordinary edition project as first editions in cooperation with the Exilarte Research Center at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. They reveal music of unique charm, in which influences from Janáček, the Second Viennese School, and French Impressionism are amalgamated into an original and exciting personal style.
Following the chamber music, the edition project will focus on the first editions of Winterberg's piano works and songs.
