Testament of Terezin

Music Ullmann Premiere Philadelphia, USA Viktor Ullmann's rediscovery is only a few years old, but has already reached the advanced stage when unfinished works are being completed. Of course, Ullmann is a somewhat special case: a Czech-Jewish composer who studied with both Schoenberg and Zemlinsky, he apparently had trouble completing works before being transported to Terezin, the Nazi transit camp outside Prague, in 1942. He then enjoyed a brief but remarkable creative outpouring, only to be sent to his death in Auschwitz in 1944.

Even though his Second Symphony has been played and recorded, his First waited until this week - the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz - for its first performance (by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Wolfgang Sawallisch). Both symphonies are orchestrations of Piano Sonatas composed in Terezin. Not that Ullmann was simply out to get more mileage from the same material. The Fifth Sonata (1943), on which the First Symphony is based, has always seemed in need of a third hand to realise its larger-scale ambitions. But having heard Bernhard Wulff's revelatory new orchestration, based on ideas left in one of Ullmann's manuscripts, more hands at the keyboard still wouldn't have been enough.

Though the symphony sometimes seems as truncated and unfinished as the original sonata, the music blooms in all sorts of directions in this new incarnation. Where the sonata seems dense, furrow-browed and occasionally obscure, the layered orchestration reveals all sorts of ironic, satiric undertones and a fair amount of the humour so richly apparent in his recently recorded opera, Der Kaiser von Atlantis. The sort of pathos one would expect from a work written in a Jewish ghetto is nowhere to be found in this tough, unsentimental score, which sounds more like early Shostakovich than late Ullmann.

The work opens with a long-legged, late-Beethoven-style fugue that takes on an intriguingly subversive agenda as lyrical woodwind melodies are taken up less gracefully by the lower brass. Ullmann never presents a lyrical idea without showing its seamy side, and vice versa. If his melodies are like chameleons, they change colours at astonishing speed.

The other movements have their surprises, but they also have their weak moments from the standpoint of thematic development. No doubt Ullmann would have refined and expanded the piece had he lived; as it is, it may be more a curiosity than a repertoire item.

Perhaps as we gain a broader perspective on the composer, this truncated quality - the way musical ideas are constantly interrupted in the fourth movement - will be seen as making a programmatic point: activities at Terezin were constantly cut off by transports to Auschwitz. But even taking the music purely on its merits, Ullmann emerges as a modernist whose strong ethnic identity gave his work a flavour and heartiness that his contemporaries often lacked.