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My personal addition to this is the Concertstuck for Piano and Orchestra by Albert Ketelby.  A fascinating thought!  I also have a tape of the Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra by Reginald King (and I see that this work is on YouTube).

Has anyone here mentioned Jaromir Weinberger?  When I was a kid, I was hooked by the Polka and Fugue from 'Schwanda the Bagpiper' - deliciously noisy upbeat stuff - but was never able to locate anything else by him on record.  As time went by, a few more works trickled through, most significantly two complete modern recordings of 'Schwanda' and historic recordings of the Czech Rhapsody, the Variations on Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree and the Christmas Overture (the latter conducted by Barbirolli with the NY Phil, an unhappy association as I recollect).  This could hardly be described as a feast, and even in these days of independent labels determined to unearth and record everything, Weinberger remains terra incognito so far.

The poor guy had to flee Europe to the USA to escape the Nazis and eventually, in 1967, ended his life with a bottle of aspirin tablets after suffering depression at the neglect of his works and a terminal illness.

What little I have heard convinces me that it's high time that some of his works (other than 'Schwanda') received modern recordings. This is surely prime Naxos or cpo territory.

Hi Dennis,

It's some time since I listened to the Melartin symphonies and I can't remember a particular favourite.  This discussion has prompted me to dig out the CDs and listen again - which is just what I shall do now!

Following on from Melartin, has anyone come across the works of Kuula or Suolahti?  Both died young and both were formidable composers.  I have a couple of orchestral works by Kuula in recordings from the radio and a piano trio, recorded by BIS. 

Hekki Suolahti was only 16 when he died - complications of a hernia, I think - and the only work I have ever heard was written the year before he died - the Sinfonia piccola, which has been broadcast several times on 'Through the Night' on Radio 3.  It begins just like Sibelius's First Symphony - two solo clarinets - but it's an amazingly compact and masterly work for someone of that age - most memorable. He left several other works but I have never been able to get hold of any of them.  Have any of you heard this work, and if so, what do you think?

I got into Melartin in an unusual way.  When I was a kid, there was a TV programme in which you were taught how to draw (totally lost on me, alas).  The signature tune was a lovely little waltz, which stuck in my memory, though I never was able to discover what on earth it was.

Years later, I bought an LP in a sale; it was called 'Finnish Miniatures for String Quartet', or something like that.  When I played it, to my utter delight, one of the pieces was that very theme that had haunted me for so long.  It was Melartin's 'Butterfly Waltz'.  I looked up Melartin in Grove and saw that he had written loads of other works, including six symphonies.  More years passed and I then saw a CD of a couple of the symphonies and bought it.  I was expecting half an hour of symphonic Butterfly-Waltz-like themes - simple, diatonic and charming.  Boy, I didn't know what had hit me; massive Mahlerian gestures, opulently orchestrated and absolutly compelling.  I bought the other two CDs of the sumphoonies and also managed to get the Violin Concerto from the radio.  Magnificent stuff.

Thanks Mark - it's great being a member of such an erudite group. 

Mark, I have the Wartensee two-clarinet concerto on an Ex Libris LP, coupled with Krommers Sinfonia Concertante for Flute, Clarinet, Violin and Orchestra, which clocks in at 43 minutes 13 seconds.  Surely this must have been one of the longest concertante works of its time!

Only last week, I transferred two Wartensee symphonies (2 & 3) from LP to CD for a friend of mine who, like us, is into rarities.  I also have a glass harmonica work by him on an old DG 45 rpm disc.

...and by the way, the other three composers who share my birthday are also unjustfiably unsung!  They are Zarebski, John Alden Carpenter and Parish-Alvars!  Maybe I was born to be an unsung composer devotee. :-)

Yes, I was delighted to hear these works as Bortkiewicz is one of my favourite unsung composers - who obviously had good taste as he chose to be born exactly 70 years to the day before I was.  I never suspected that I would ever hear these concertos - nor the Second and Third Piano Concertos - so this past month has yielded rich rewards.

Now, as to the provenence of the recordings of the Violin and Cello Concertos, I suspect that they may be computer-created.  Listening to the Cello Concerto on headphones a couple of days ago, I noticed that the orchestral entries all seemed to enjoy perfect ensemble and the sforzandi were all perfect too.  There was also something about the sound in general - very little, if any, resonance and slightly unnatural, especially the strings.  On the other hand, the soloist seemed more natural - intonation was not always absolutely perfect in the more passionate passages.  Unless anyone has any other ideas, I suspect that the orchestral part was created first and then the cellist dubbed the part on to it.

If I am correct, then I can only admire the person who probably took weeks to do all this work in order that we could hear these hitherto unknown concertos.  Some years back, Mike posted the Cello Concerto and Second Piano Concerto to me on a cassette, in the form of a MIDI re-creation by some Borty devotee.  It was very good to hear these, but the impression was that of the Mighty Wurlizer and while listening I kept getting small change out of my pocket to pay the usherette for a packet of popcorn.  These new versions are infinitely superior.

What do you guys think?

Nobody has mentioned Stenhammar's 3rd!  It's a fragment lasting only a couple of minutes; a magnificent opening and that's it.  Maybe someone could pay Anthony Payne to recontruct the whole work!  Ideal listening if you are in a hurry.     It's on Chandos.

Then there's Richard Wetz.  Has he ever been mentioned in these threads?

Finally, there's Gorecki's - I shall risk a flaying by stating that this is surely the most boring symphony ever written.

For my money, I would recommend a 'BOGOF'; a work that could appear both in this thread and in the Unsung Cello Concertos thread too, and which, when I first heard it on the wireless in 1965, in a broadcast from the Schwetzingen Festival, sent me into stratospheric orbit.  It's the Concertino for Clarinet, Cello and Orchestra by Peter von Winter.  I am sure that he needs no introduction in these 'heiligen hallen'.  However, if any of you don't have this gorgeous work, then I can upload it for you.  I recorded the original broadcast on my open reel recorder, but then it appeared on a Nonesuch LP. 

At the time, Winter was totally unsung; as far as I know, that LP was his debut on a commercial recording.  Since then, several works have appeared:  concert(in)os for flute, bassoon and clarinet, two symphonies, a sinfonia concertante and vocal works, including a complete opera, Maometto II.    I have all of these except the opera.  I must say that none of the other works have quite equalled that Clarinet and Cello Concertino though; even a CD recording that substituted a bassoon for the cello is not quite the full shilling in terms of instrumental timbre - Winter knew what he was doing, I think, when he specified the cello (unless, of course, one of you erudite guys might tell me that you once saw the m/s, which clearly specified the bassoon as the preferred instrument!). 

As I said - I would be delighted to put this work up on the disk, and any others that I mentioned above, though I am pretty sure that you will already have them.

As far as I am concerned, the holy grail for Winter fans is a pair of BASF LPs of his chamber music, in that legendary series of music from various German principalities.  I have most of these but the Winter has eluded me.  Anyone out there got this?

Yes, I have some.  On an old Monitor LP (these were dubbings of Soviet recordings, mostly in dreadful sound but boasting artists like Richter) I have what purports to be a viola concerto by Khandoshkin, which I always suspected was a relic from the Old Spuriosity Shop' - the second movement sounds like Korngold, and the outer movements sound nothing like late 18thC writing, with stratospheric violin parts.  The soloist was none other than Leonid Kogan with the Moscow Chamber Orchestra conducted by Rudolph Barshai, and having just checked on Google, this is indeed now listed as being by Goldstein!

Then there was the Centaur recording of a Symphony in E major purporting to be a newly discovered work by Schubert!  (Nothing to do with the sketched Symphony No. 7 in the same key).  This was such an obviously spurious piece of rubbish (stringing together loads of cribs from Schubert's music) that it was almost entertainment in itself - like McGonagle's poetry or the singing of Florence Foster-Jenkins. 

Finally - you mention above the E-flat Violin Concerto K268 by 'Mozart' now attributed to Eck, and another one in D major in Mozart's style by Sauzay, written in 1837.  Is this latter one the Concerto in D, K271a, once recorded by Menuhin?  If so, then I must say that I am disappointed, as I think this is a magnificent work and I always liked to think that it was by Mozart, despite the stylistic reservations expressed by some detractors.  Unlike the efforts of Casadesus, this really does sound quite convincing.

Don't despair too quickly.  These external drives come in two parts - the container and the disk itself. Sometimes the failure is in the enclosure and sometimes it is the disk. One can open the container carefully and extract the disk and then connect it to the PC with a special adapter.  If it was the container that was faulty, then you should be able to see all your files again this way.  This is not the kind of thing that you should attempt unless you are technically competent, but if you don't feel able to do it, a good repair centre should be able to do this very quickly.  The only snag is that once you open the thing, you void the guarantee, unless you are able to put it together without any sign that it was dismantled.

A friend of mine was in exactly the same predicament a few weeks ago.  We extracted the disk but unfortunately we managed to establish that it was the disk and not the enclosure.  On the other hand, a client of mind had the same problem and in his case it was the enclosure.  It's a pretty sad reflection on the state of IT that hard disk failure, which was quite rare a few years ago, is becoming more common.  It's probably because the more data you can cram on to the disk, the more critical are the operating parameters; I stall have a few 10Gb disks that are several years old and still work fine.

My friend and I were able to put the thing together again and send it off for a replacement, but he lost loads of music.  I hope that this will not be the case for you.