Symphonic Innovators at the turn of the 19th Century

[Alan Howe]

Apart from the innovative heavy orchestration, I'm afraid I don't find Eggert's music particularly extraordinary (mind you, I only know the C major and E flat major symphonies), although I do like it. As for being 'far ahead of his time', I'm afraid I can't quite hear that either, although the E flat work does whip up a storm in parts: it's as if it lurches backwards and forwards from late 18th to early-19th century-style music. Perhaps the C minor Symphony will prove more forward-looking overall.

[Syrelius]

Apart from the innovative heavy orchestration, I'm afraid I don't find Eggert's music particularly extraordinary (mind you, I only know the C major and E flat major symphonies), although I do like it. As for being 'far ahead of his time', I'm afraid I can't quite hear that either, although the E flat work does whip up a storm in parts: it's as if it lurches backwards and forwards from late 18th to early-19th century-style music. Perhaps the C minor Symphony will prove more forward-looking overall.

Since I have no musical education or training whatsoever, I'm afraid that I am not the man to make a technical analysis of Eggerts works. However, Eggert's orchestration seems rather personal to me, and, as Hofrat has pointed out, he was a pioneer in his way of using the trombone. He also made experiments in form, like in the E flat symphony. And, to my untrained ears, his music at least SOUNDS modern for its time. I find it odd that no record company, and not even the Musica Sveciae anthology has bothered about his symphonies (until the Naxos project), while less personal contemporaries like Wilms, for instance, have received the interest of a number of record companies.

[Alan Howe]

I agree that Eggert is well worthy of the attention of the record companies and am glad that Naxos will soon be bringing out a CD. All I meant was that, while admiring the foward-looking orchestration and sonorities, Eggert doesn't seem to create a fully forward-looking idiom, so that the end result for me is somewhat partial in its effect.