Messages

I think I'm going to have to disagree, Mark (for once!!) I actually find the melodic material of No.4 leads the ear on in a delightful manner. I'm also left wondering whether this post-Beethovenian style is actually something like a Tyrolean/Austrian national school with symphonic expansiveness as its hallmark.

Just been listening to No.4 and I was struck by the similarities to Lachner (Franz). Of course Netzer, like Lachner and Rufinatscha - and Schubert (briefly) and Bruckner - was a pupil of Simon Sechter in Vienna. Curiouser and curiouser...

I'm sure you have encountered some very minor pieces by Netzer, Peter. The symphonies are definitely worth getting to know. My favourite is No.4, but all of them are attractive, lively and beautifully scored.

Another interesting composer being promoted by the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck is the Tyrolean Josef Nezter (1808-64). He wrote four symphonies (1837, 1838, 1845, 1849), all clearly in a post-Beethovenian style, but all very enjoyable. I had written them off as being very much inferior to those of Rufinatscha, but some careful re-listening has shown them to have both real quality and stature. Has anyone else encountered them?

The mention of Peter Heise sent me scurrying to various other websites - and sure enough there are a number of CDs of his music, of which I have heard not a single note. Perhaps friends can enlighten me as to the merits of this composer?

Thanks, Gareth. I was just wondering whether the Wieniawski (J.) PC was on the same sort of scale as his Violin Sonata...

Gareth: can you tell us anything more about the PC by Jozef Wieniawski? I have only ever come across his (enormous) Violin Sonata on Dux...

May I echo Gareth's words? But, if the first of these is available for Christmas, I shall be buying it for myself!

For me it's the music - and the quality of the singing - that does it. All the visuals in the world cannot compensate for mediocre singers. Of course the story and production do matter - and when singing, conducting, playing, story and production all come together, then you have an overwhelming total experience. For me, this was when Carlos Kleiber conducted Otello at Covent Garden with Placido Domingo. Stunning. But for me the music must come first.

Start with Puccini: Boheme, Tosca.
Then Verdi: Traviata, Trovatore, Rigoletto, Don Carlos, Aida, Otello.
Or Massenet: Manon, Werther, Esclarmonde.
Or Wagner: Walküre Act 1 (Karajan).
Unsung: Goldmark Queen of Sheba (Hungaroton).

Draeseke excelled in almost every genre too. A shame very few people seem to know his music.

No.1 is surely the weakest of Raff's symphonies - but it's hard not to be won over by its sheer invention and patent sincerity. I love it too!

Martucci was one of my first unsung discoveries. I have always esteemed the symphonies very highly - in particular no.2. And yes, that first movement does sound very Sibelian in parts. It is interesting to play 'spot the influence', but it seems to me that Martucci makes his own unique synthesis of the various musical styles which interested him. I am not surprised at all that the great Toscanini thought him worthy of his attention.

Has anyone tried Julius Röntgen's PC2 on Donemus? A stunningly beautiful opening to a truly marvellous work.

I think that Beethoven's symphonies cast a shadow over the entire symphonism of the nineteenth century - including Schubert, Lachner and everyone else. What I find interesting - and significant - is that Schubert and Lachner did not follow Beethoven in the expansion of the symphony to include voices along the lines of B9. There is also something quite extraordinary in the composition of such an epic-scale (hour-long), purely orchestral symphony as L5 in the mid-1830s. This scale is not approached by anyone else, with the exception of Rufinatscha in his own 6th Symphony from the mid-1860s, until the emergence of Bruckner (and Rubinstein - although the latter does not operate in his longer symphonies at anything like the level of inspiration). Raff 1 is, of course, a very lengthy symphony too, but, with its 5-movement structure, proved to be - at least as far as length was concerned - an early symphonic one-off in a cycle in which a classicising concision would become more typical than Romantic expansion.