Starting in 1914 he studied composition with Sergei Taneyev in Moscow, and in 1915 moved to St. Petersburg to continue his studies in composition with Alexander Glasunov and Jazeps Vitols. His most extensive composition of those years, his Andante con Variazioni in E-Major, Op. 10, was composed for his final examination in St. Petersburg in the summer of 1918.

Albrecht spent the years 1919 to 1922 in Yalta, where he founded a private conservatory and was in personal contact with the composer Vladimir Rebikov. Just as he had earlier worked with Georgian and Lithuanian folk songs, he now turned to the music of the Greek Orthodox church and Byzantine chorale. In 1923 he accepted a teaching position in Moscow at an affiliate of the Conservatory and also continued to do research in folk song. At that time he also composed some worker’s choruses, including the Greetings from a German Poet, Op. 16, on a text by Johannes R. Becher.

Because of the increasing pressures in cultural politics in Soviet Russia, he that very year joined the large wave of immigrants which brought numerous artists and musicians, including composer colleagues such as Arthur Lourié, into exil in western Europe or America.

Georg von Albrecht went once again to Stuttgart, working there for the eurythmics class of the Waldorf School and also performing as a concert pianist. In 1924 he took over the direction of the Russian-Greek-Orthodox church choir, the "Stuttgart Musical-Anthropological Alliance". The Liturgy of John Chrysostom, composed that same year, was written for that musical group.

In 1936 he became an instructor for ear-training, then in 1939 for harmony at the Stuttgart Music Conservatory. After 1946 he taught harmony and composition there. He moved to the Conservatory in Heidelberg in 1956 and continued teaching there until an advanced age. His late, sacred œuvre was composed there, too. For his compositional œuvre and his ethnomusicological research Georg von Albrecht was awarded the Glinka Prize of the Belyayev Foundation and the Johann-Wenzel-Stamitz Prize of the Künstlergilde, Esslingen.

Characteristics of von Albrecht’s style and the changes they underwent are especially distinct in his works for piano. Gerhard Frommel, who emphasized the "uncompromising, unforgiving" and "unperfumed" aspects of this music, divided them into three groups: the folkloristic, the late Romantic and the new-style sound experiments (in the Festschrift Georg von Albrecht, Stuttgart 1962).

The three piano sonatas on this CD (the composer left four all together) present as it were the various ingredients of Albrecht’s musical language in changing proportions and with different emphases: pentatonic, through which the composer linked up with his early "folkloristic" works; modality, including new scales created from the overtone and undertone rows, polytonality and mirror technique – all means of shaping the material which are not always unproblematical in relation to sonata forming.

The four-movement First Piano Sonata in G-sharp Minor, Op. 34, completed in 1929 a first cycle of larger chamber music works (a string quartet, a piano trio, a violin sonata). In it the composer recalls the past and refers back to the late Romantic period and to elements of Alexander Scriabin’s musical language, among others. The falling triads of the first movement (Allegro) use material of the antique Greek chromatic tetrachord. The second theme is a simple, diatonic, Romantic melody type. The second, slow movement (Andante sostenuto) presents – after a striking theme – a contrapunctally artful middle section in which the notes played by the left hand exactly mirror those of the right-hand part.

In the Allegro the first pentatonic theme is followed by a chromatically modulating middle section and a second theme in the Phrygian mode. In the last movement (Andante con variazioni), thematic and harmonic reminiscences of the falling triads of the first movement appear in the four variations with finale. As in other compositions by von Albrecht from the period between 1926 and 1929, it, too, shows the tendency to "overcome tragic states through mournful melodies" (Georg von Albrecht, Vom Volkslied zur Zwölftontechnik, Frankfurt a.M. 1984), which was understood as a melancholy backward glance at the years in St. Petersburg, Moscow and on the Crimea.

Georg von Albrecht wrote few works during the Second World War. This was due in part to his intensive work on the opera Our Father (1938/40). Songs and choruses were succeded by the Second Piano Sonata in C-Minor, Op. 53 at the turn of the year 1944/45. As did Arthur Honegger in his Second Symphony, or Olivier Messiaen in the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (here from the perspective of the victim of internment), von Albrecht reacted to the emotions of the last months of the war in this two-movement work, which was conceived in its content and compositional technique as his legacy.

In the Allegro, with its dramatic first theme, the antithetic motivic design is transformed into an accentuated polyphonic linearity in which quintuplets dominate the spun-out melody. The variation form favored by the composer defines the second (and last) movement: In each of the eleven short variations, the bitonal Adagio theme is linked in an ostinato with a different minor key of the circle of fifths.

Polytonality, which in the course of the neoclassical tendencies of the 1930s was also cultivated in France (for example, by Darius Milhaud and Charles Koechlin), became for the composer von Albrecht, who was interested in philosophy and himself of mixed German-Russian heritage, a symbol for the harmonious living together as neighbors of people of various cultures and tongues. Different from the techniques used by the advocates of polytonality in France, here the intervals generated by the two different keys are welded together using the rules of the old-fashioned polyphonic style to created a kind of expansion in the vertical axis of the polyphonic principle.

Georg von Albrecht’s preference for polyphony and for rhythmic and melodic mirroring can be found already in his early piano scherzo, Spiel der Spiegelungen, Op. 7 (1914). Fifty years later, after a long period in which he produced nothing in this genre, the brief Sonate der Spiegelungen auf ein Zwölftonthema (Mirroring Sonata on a Twelve-tone Theme, his third piano sonata), Op. 72 was written (1964).

This three-movement piece, which is centered on the note G, marks out the tonal compass of the first movement (Con moto) with octave leaps. A short, chorale-like Larghetto is followed by a Rondo-Allegro which – after a chain of chords of a fourth – returns once again in the finale to the twelve-tone row in the octave series. In this, a tendency of the composer which had been developing since 1936 becomes very clear: he does not use polytonality and twelve-tone technique as formal means in themselves, but presents them as the result of simple principles of construction, often derived from folk music. His tonal interpretation of twelve-tone technique, his preference for polyphony, especially for mirroring devices, made it possible for Georg von Albrecht to meld extremely varied compositional techniques within single works.

Benno Schnatz