Another historic performance from German Radio this week – Jenny Abel, Violin and Maria Bergmann, piano in a Schubert Radio recital, recorded at Sendesaal des Karlsruher Studios, South German Radio – April 11, 1963. The featured work is the Violin Sonata D. 574.
Jenny Abel began playing the violin at the age of 6 and gave her first concert the following year. After important artistic inspiration from Yehudi Menuhin and Hans Rosbaud, she became a junior student at the Freiburg Music Academy at the age of 13 , and later in Cologne. At the age of 14, she received an invitation from Max Rostal to attend his master class in London. She studied with Ulrich Koch and Henryk Szeryng . She quickly pursued an international concert career that took her throughout Europe, the USA, South America, Asia and Australia. She played a violin from the Guarnieri workshop from 1698. From 1964, she performed with Leonard Hokanson . Jenny Abel has an entry in the Lexikon Musik und Gender.
Through her friendship with Wilhelm Furtwängler’s family, she came into contact with Oskar Kokoschka , who portrayed her in 1978 in the seven-part series Jenny Abel plays Bartók and Bach, now in the possession of the Vienna Albertina. The correspondence between Kokoschka and Abel is in the Zurich Central Library. Abel has lived in Gernsbach in the northern Black Forest since she was three years old.
Since the beginning of her career, Jenny Abel has not only dealt with the great standard works of the repertoire, but has also placed a special emphasis on rarely performed compositions. She has been entrusted with numerous world premieres, including works by Volker Blumenthaler , Gerhard Rosenfeld , Boguslaw Schaeffer , Tamara Ibragimowa and Giannis Papaioannou.
Gerhard Rosenfeld and Jenny Abel were connected by a long artistic friendship. He composed three sonatas for the violinist. Hans Werner Henze wrote the solo sonata Tirsi, Mopso, Aristeo for her, which she performed more than a hundred times in over 20 countries after the premiere in Montepulciano. Abel often takes artistically uncompromising paths, both in unusual solo programs and in the violin-piano duo, and draws musical-dramatic arcs from baroque music to modern music. Her long-term duo partners included the pianists Roberto Szidon, Leonard Hokanson and Mihai Ungureanu.
Maria Bergmann was born in 1918 and died in 2000 and essentially worked full time as a radio pianist for a single station, the Südwestfunk, starting in 1946. She was called upon to collaborate and accompany scores of singers and instrumentalists, fill in gaps between spoken programs, and record the occasional solo recital. According to the booklet notes, SWR’s database shows more than 2700 hits when Maria Bergmann’s name is entered. Clearly the job kept her busy. The recordings span 15 years until her retirement in 1982.
