Schroeder Premieres

Julius Klengel                   

Capriccio in D minor, Op. 3 (before 1882)

​

When Klengel's first 3 opuses were published in the fall of 1882, the cellist-composer dedicated his Op. 1 to his composition teacher and Op. 2 to his Gewandhaus Orchestra and Leipzig Conservatory colleague, Alwin Schroeder. It is questionable whether Schroeder ever performed Klengel's Op. 2, but the Capriccio, Op. 3, was a mainstay in his concert repertoire for at least thirty years. Early reviews opin that the player needs "an arm of steel" to execute the relentless stream of sixteenths of this perpetual motion style piece, and praise Schroeder's "clean, sparkling spiccato," a quality that another Leipzig instrumentalist-composer, Hans Sitt, would later highlight in cello works dedicated to Schroeder.  During the 1880s Schroeder also played Klengel's better-known 

Scherzo, Op. 6 with some regularity, but he seems to have dropped it from his repertoire within a few years of his arrival in the US.