Viktor Ullmann: Little Cakewalk – Shira Karmon & Maria Garzon

The title of the album “Little Cakewalk” by the Israeli soprano Shira Karmon and the pianist María Garzón with songs by Viktor Ullmann is a contradiction to the content of this CD, as well as to Ullmann’s life and fate: Many of the works on this album date from the period after the Nazis came to power or his 1942 internment in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he escaped labor coercion because of his musical work, which was to prove useful to the regime. Ullmann used a comparatively easier to grasp tonal language here, probably in order to be able to give his suffering fellow human beings surrounding him as light-hearted pleasure as possible. Shira Karmon presents, among others, three songs based on texts by Friedrich Hölderlin, the Six Songs Op. 17, three Yiddish songs, four of Six Sacred Songs Op. 20, and “Six Sonnets de Louise Labé” Op. 34. Ullmann’s compositional style carries the lightness of jazz influences as well as complex contrapuntal phrases, unex-pected melodic developments, and a harmonic language that sometimes leaves the listener perplexed.