How did it start - for you?

[peter_conole]

Hi all

It is a fair question,. and a lively one. We are all here because of the once-neglected but now 'emerging' fame of Joachim Raff. He is the alpha and omega of these fora (forums, whatever).

And as an important side issue, the music of - (no beating around the bush here, as the parameters are clearly and desirably laid down at the point of entry) - other neglected composers of the romantic era. Large numbers of them. That means up to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with some elasticity into later times, depending on the tolerance/patience of the forum moderators.

Whatever, we all got here via different pathways. In my case, the interest in classical music began early. It was not an inherited thing, simply something that was incorporated in life from day one - ie, because of a fairly musical union of families with minor pro musicians and an equally minor composer or two.

The cd revolution sealed things up. That is, I no longer had to tolerate the yapping and baloney of musical academics and subsidised 'progressive' composers when life circumstances made it possible to go out and explore forbidden territory. That meant Raff and co. My earliest Cd purchasing experiences were in about 1991, and involved a couple of interesting decisions and choices - and a revolt against 'dominant paradigms'.

How was it with other folk?

regards
Peter

[FBerwald]

Nielsen's Op. 1 Little suite for strings did it for me. I was hooked after the 1st hearing..actually that was the 1st classical piece i ever heard. A few days later the Berwald 3rd Symphony - Singulare. Since then I have been curious about unsung composers, and as a result encountered many gems one wouldn't hear in the concert halls!

[Syrelius]

I became interested in unsung composers at about the same time that I got interested in classical music in general. The slow movement of Berwald's symphony in e flat was used as the theme for a TV-series. I liked it, and borrowed the Erling/LSO recording at the local library. Having heard the Sinfonie Singuliere on the same LP and realizing that Berwald was more or less an unknown name outside of Sweden (at least to the general public) made me understand that there must be quite a few lesser known composers of great interest. So the Sinfonie Singuliere is very much the reason for my interest in unsung composers too, FBerwald!

[Alan Howe]

I've always been interested in music by unsung composers, without knowing about more than a smattering of them. Martucci's two symphonies were certainly formative in my own experience - followed more recently by the work of Dr Alan Krueck on Draeseke, my acquaintance with the grandson of Julius Röntgen (who lives in Holland) and then the Raff website and Mark Thomas.

I know it will embarrass him terribly, but Mark has introduced me to more music which I would never otherwise have encountered or contemplated listening to than any other source.

And finally, it has been through the members of this forum that I have gone on to consider other composers - I think particularly of John White and his enthusiasm for Spohr and (Franz) Lachner.

I try to scan all the posts to check whether someone's enthusiasm concerns music which I have previously dismissed or just don't know. The latest seems to be Henselt's Piano Trio: it's duly gone on the wanted list...

[sdtom]

In a single word "Vox" was the company that introduced me to composers I had never heard or experienced before.

[Hofrat]

It all began with the question "who was the first composer to score trombones in a symphony?"  I discovered that it was not Beethoven, but rather an unknown (or unsung as we say) Swedish composer named Joachim Eggert.

[Steve B]

Tom, which were the Vox/Candide/Turnabout Lps you started with, and liked.

Mine were the Ponti Piano Concerti; and the other Romantic piano concerti stuff they did, with other pianists- Blumenthal et al.

I liked the slightly camp covers, sort of ersatz Rococo, they often used, especially for the Baroque stuff.

If I had to choose two early favourites, it would Be Gade "Fairy Spell"(Hye-Knudsen)-captivating melodies; and Blumenthal playing the Paderewski PC and the Rubinstein Konzertstuck

Cheap Saga Lps were another introduction: some excruciating recordings but also some highlights - Rostropovich playing Saint-Saens cello Concerto number 2; Janet Baker singing "Frauen liebe und leben". And the excruciating ones did have their so-bad-they-are-not-good-but-are-characterful-and-a-laugh element. Fidelio too, one of Barrington-Coupe's first labels.The Danzig Phil and other such pseudonymous orchestras!

The first music I ever  heard, and recall as noticing, was Bizet's Carmen Suite-in my playpen.

And when I was about 10, a friend of my mum and dad's gave me my very first LP-Readers Digest "magical melodies", which contained Nicolai's "merry Wives of Windsor" overture.

A nice idea for a thread, Peter.

Steve

[Peter1953]

I'll never forget. I went for the first time to Indonesia in July 1975 which took in those days 23 hours from Amsterdam to Jakarta. On the KLM's in-flight classical music channel I heard for the first time Hummel's piano concerto in B minor op. 89. I was so overwhelmed that I have listened to this concerto over and over again, and when I flew back in August I was so pleased that it was still programmed on the in-flight channel. My interest in unknown and forgotten gems was triggered for good.

[John H White]

I came from a completely unmusical family. Sometime, at the age of around 12, about the middle of the World War II, I happened to hear symphonies by Haydn & Mozart on the "wireless", as we used to call it. I at once became a teenage rebel, turning my back on Bing Crosby and the rest of the pop music of that time. Eventually, my parents bought me a piano for £8 from the upstairs tenants who were moving out. I took lessons from the age of 13 until I was 17 but, as I had to thump the keys to get any sound out of them, the furthest I managed to get to by that time was Beethoven's easy sonata Op 49 No 2 at around half pace!
  Around that time, I was hearing lots of Orchestral and chamber music of various types on the BBC but I didn't think much of most of the modern stuff. I reckoned that these modern composers had lost the plot and I though I must guide them back to the straight and narrow by writing a symphony myself in the Haydn style. Sadly, at that time my knowledge of harmony and counterpoint was practically zero, so that I had to abandon the project for the time being. That was 1948 when I was 17. 50 years later I was able at last to get it written down as a project on a composition course with the Open College of the Arts.
   I became acquainted with some of the music of lesser known composers through LPs produced by smaller record companies such as Turnabout and Vox.
I was particularly impressed with the Berwald symphonies and I can thank Saga,
the first cheapo label at ten bob a time (50p in todays money), for introducing me to my 1st Spohr work,the delightful Nonet. I had previously read up about Spohr in our 1901 edition of Chambers Encyclopaedia and was longing to hear his Historical Symphony. Around 1949, I heard a performance of Raff's Lenore Symphony on the BBC and I was humming and whistling the tune of the march for around 40 years until I stumbled on a 2nd hand LP of the symphony in a record shop in York, where I had gone for my eldest son's graduation ceremony.
  The introduction of CD's and the consequent growth of smaller specialist record labels like Marco Polo, Chandos, Hungaraton etc. etc. brought me lots of music that I'd only read about and plenty that I hadn't.
   I think I'd better finish there having bored you all stiff with how I got into what I refer to as "grown up music".

[JimL]

I'll never forget. I went for the first time to Indonesia in July 1975 which took in those days 23 hours from Amsterdam to Jakarta. On the KLM's in-flight classical music channel I heard for the first time Hummel's piano concerto in B minor op. 89. I was so overwhelmed that I have listened to this concerto over and over again, and when I flew back in August I was so pleased that it was still programmed on the in-flight channel. My interest in unknown and forgotten gems was triggered for good.

Peter, that must have been that old butchered Vox recording with Martin Galling, bad acoustics and all!  I'm glad the Hummel B Minor has since been recorded in its complete version with better sound engineering.  In any event, since you asked...

Blurry, wavy flashback effect, please...

Actually it started back in elementary school, when a neighborhood kid, Lee Greenwald, gained quite a bit of attention playing the piano at various school functions.  He was quite good, and another one of my best friends, Jim Anchell, was quite the music buff, and wrote a bunch of reports on Beethoven, Mozart, et al.  It was at his house that I first heard an LP featuring Rimsky-Korsakov's Quintet for Piano and Winds (coupled with Janacek's Capriccio for same).  Now, my Dad had always been a bit of a classical music fan (truth be told, there wasn't much else he did like), so I had heard quite a bit of standard stuff (William Tell Overture, Beethoven S 5, etc.) growing up, but Lee's keyboard success and Jim's knowledgeability motivated me to learn the piano and study music.  It was in the record stores that my Dad took me to in Westwood (and in the record bins at the now defunct Fedco) that I first encountered names like Sgambati (the PC), Brull (PC 2), and, of course, Raff.  I started poring over the bins at the Wherehouse and other now defunct record stores, and found a treasure trove of music by composers I had never heard of.  I found more in the LP section of the Santa Monica Library (where I heard Lewenthal's traversal of the Henselt Concerto for the first time).  This inspired me to become a great Romantic Revivalist pianist.  Unfortunately, I washed out of the actual performance aspect of it in college, but I never lost my interest in the unsung Romantics and am certainly pleased that I stumbled into the Raff Society Forums 3 years ago while looking to see if there was a CD of Frank Cooper's premiere recording of the Raff PC (there isn't, as of yet) and found that I'm not alone.

[peter_conole]

Hi  all

Threre is nothing boring about your posting, John! Varied experiences indeed for all of us. The music interest in my family is now in its fourth generation,ie, with me. I can remember as a youngster how I really wanted to be a composer. It stated with pretty wild assault's on my aunt's piano and later - after moving to another town - untaught efforts at composition using a numbering/lettering scheme of my own invention. That was at age 8 to 10.

Disrupted education and the struggle to build a career created huge gaps later, but the 'adult music' was always in the background. Anything with the slightest smell of 'rock music' was always just something nasty that happened to other people. Am taking time out for a two-days, so will talk more later. The 'road to Damascus' experience came with the purchase of my first CDs in the early 90s. Mind you, I had discovered Raff years before via a relative's vinyl collection (Lenore symphony) and the radio. 

regards
Peter

[Amphissa]

 
I never heard much classical music when I was a child - just the ordinary stuff - the Nutcracker during Christmas season, the 1812 on 4th of July, Peter and the Wolf, a bit of Bach, that sort of thing. I had no education or training that involved classical music. So, when I did start listening to classical music, it was haphazard. I began listening to unsungs without knowing they were unsungs. I'd just buy LPs and try them and buy more by composers or conductors or orchestras I liked. All composers were equally unfamiliar, thus equally unsung to me.

I'm still that way at heart. Unsystematic. Of course, now I've got a much better idea of what might interest me and what will probably not.

Being unsystematic, I suppose it is rather heretical to confess here that I've not yet heard most of the music of Raff, but as most of you know by now, I have heard a great deal by composers who are virtually unknown in the West, mostly Russian composers.

So, in answer to the question, it started for me without even knowing it had started. And I could not possibly say which "unsung" I heard first.

[Mark Thomas]

It started, as you'd expect, with Raff. Coming from a home devoid of music, I discovered classical music at university in the early 70s. The first LP I bought was Barenboim's performance of Tchaikovsky's Fourth. Being a logical (some would say unimaginative) soul, I reckoned that if I liked that, I'd like all his symphonies, so I bought them all and loved them. So then I thought: "Hmm, he was from the mid-19th century, so I expect I'll like other symphonies from around then". Next, I think was Dvorak, all of whose symphonies (from Kertesz on Decca for preference) I soon mopped up. Within a few weeks I'd chanced upon Herrmann's classic recording of Raff's Lenore. I didn't know that Raff was a total unknown then, I just assumed that he was up there with Tchaikovsky and Dvorak and was duly utterly bowled over by it. When I went back to the shop to buy more Raff I was dumbfounded to find that there was none.

My tendency to vacuum up everything I can find by a particular composer or in a particular genre or era once I have developed a taste for it quite naturally meant that I soon discovered the Genesis and Vox labels and my interest in Raff's fellow unsungs was aroused and has never left me. I suppose it's fired by two things. In the case of Raff in particular as well as a love of his music there's the sense that he has suffered a real injustice and that posterity has denied us things of real beauty. In the case of unsungs generally, there is (still, after all these years) an insatiable curiosity for the new, the thought that the next "new" piece I hear will be a hidden masterpiece.

Of course the advent of the internet meant that I soon realised that I wasn't alone in my dedication to Raff, which lead in the late 1990s to the web site and, eventually, this Forum.

My life has been enriched hugely by it all and in particular by the many friendships, both physical and virtual, which I've been lucky enough to make as  a result. And the good thing is: it goes on and on...

[Ilja]

For me, it all began with an LP recording of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony as well, but this time by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeni Mravinsky, on DG. It was a present from my grandparents, and just the thing for an eight-year-old. Quite unlike the difficult Berio-esque works my parents would occasionally drag me to. The Mravinsky fourth is still one of my favourite recordings of them all. It was soon followed by the Fifth and Sixth symphonies. After spending most of my teens in denial, listening to Joy Division and the Sisters of Mercy whilst feeling miserable (as one is wont), I returned to classical music in my student days. That was more or less during the Mahler heyday of the early 1990s, when buying a Mahler set was still something that might very well bankrupt you - in my case it most certainly did, and you can imagine my chagrin when I could buy the same set (Frankfurt RSO/Inbal) for about a twentieth of the price a decade later. After that, I spent much of my spare time copying LPs onto cassettes in the conservatory library (which was nextdoor to my student digs) in Groningen. Much time went also in discussing music with music students, and that led me off the beaten track of the iron repertory. I guess and important moment was a month's troughing through the Dutch Music Society's sound archives and discovering that much there, albeit unknown, was actually very, very good. That more than anything really destroyed my belief in the 'judgment from history'.
Some six years ago I started writing 'seriously' about music, and a review of the CPO release of Raff's Seasons symphonies brought me into contact with Raff.org after finding a review there which I quite disagreed with. After reading texts on the site and posts in the forum (where has Fernando gone?) my interest began to be piqued. The fact that so much fantastic music was released in the same period helped, of course.
That has brought some problems with it, though. I used to be able to say that there was no CD in my collection I didn't listen to at least once a year. At times, I'm now getting desperate whether I'll be able to listen to all the music I have at all. But I'm trying, and music has become a much larger part of my life than it ever was before.

[Kevin Pearson]

Hi all....I know this thread is kind of old but I'm new to the site.

For me my journey started through listening to rock music as a young man. It must be part of my personality but I always sought out those artists that nobody else was listening to. That led to me discovering progressive rock before it was cool to listen to it. Progressive rock led me to seeking out classical and jazz music that influenced much of it.

I think I was 16 when the sci-fi movie Zardoz, starring Sean Connery, hit the theaters. The main theme was Beethoven's 7th symphony and I had to stay through the credits to find out who wrote this wonderful music. Well, after that I started buying whatever VOX box sets I could afford. Of course much of my early adventures were the famous artists but as my love for classical music grew over the years so did my love for discovery and listening to composers that were not commonly listened to. I suppose one of my first discoveries was John Field, the contemporary of Beethoven. I suppose is Beethoven had not been born Field would have been recognized as the greatest composer of the classical era.

Anyway, I discovered Raff many years ago and have owned several CDs of his compositions. What brought me here was I recently purchased the Complete Piano Trios and did a Google search on Raff. It's great to learn that there are others out here who love his music and also love other unknowns. I hope to get some tips about what to add to my ever growing collection.

My most recent discovery is a Finnish composer Leevi Madetoja. Has anyone else heard his wonderful symphonies? He is fabulous!!

Kevin