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Piano Quintet E Minor, Op. 1; String Quartet No. 1, Op. 7 on CD

Ernst Gernot Klussmann (1901-1975) studied in Hamburg with Hermann Behn, the friend and patron of Gustav Mahler, Felix Woyrsch, and later with Joseph Haas in Munich. From 1925 he worked as a repetiteur in Bayreuth and held teaching positions in Cologne. In 1942, he was appointed director of the conservatory in Hamburg with the task of transforming it into a university of music, whose vice president he became at it's foundation in 1950. Klussmann's career invites us to take a differentiated look at the biographies of musicians who were not persecuted or driven into exile during the Nazi era, and who were reproached for being followers after the war. In the late 1920s, Klussman's music was criticized by the right-wing press as degenerate. The premiere of his 1st Symphony in Dresden in 1933 by Bruno Walter did not take place due to Walter's emigration. After the Gleichschaltung, Klussmann was part of the education system, without toeing the party line. In 2025, the Hamburg University of Music and Drama celebrates it's 75th anniversary. Reason enough to commemorate Klussmann with a first monographic CD dedicated to two chamber music works from his early period. They impressively show Klussmann's development from late Romanticism to Expressionism, a process that he was to continue after the war by embracing Schonberg's techniques of serial composition.