Fritz Brun CDs on GUILD

[adriano]

@ Maury
@ eschiss, please read my comments more exactly: I wrote that Symphonies 2-4 were printed by Hug, which means that they can be made available "for study" or "consultation" (by parcel post and agaimnst a fee, of course). This is a procedure of many publishers, unless they have agreed (for example with MPH-Repertoire Explorer) to have them reprinted (at MPH's expenses, naturally).This can be interpreted in different ways; but generally requested real "study" scores are being hired, not its PDFs. As far as autographs are concered, the Sacher Collection is even more intransigent than Hug. But Hug, for example, asked a very large hiring material sum for the instrumental parts I used for my recordings. And the Brun heirs and myself also encountered a various difficulties every time we wanted this or that Sacher scan (of the very autographs which were donated to them!). And, if we received some (in case of the Cello Sonata we had to wait for the scans over a half a year), large transparent "Sacher logo" watermark stamps were printed over the notes on every page, meaning that if something would be reproduced somewhere, their Sacher's lawyers may turn up with a penance.

The Sacher people got a real shock after having heard incidentally from me that, before handing over original MS's to Sacher, microfilms and photocopies were handed over by Bruns's son to a Berne Library and to the Zurich Central Library.
For my recordings I used the authograph photocopies of the Central Music Library - and this, luckily, before the Sacher people got shocked...

For editing the actual first printed scores of Bruns's Cello Sonata and of his 1st String Quartet, I had to sign a contract, obliging me to destroy the corresponding scans, once the printed scores would be published! This is absolutely grotesque!

We had various meetings in Basle, where the Brun heirs and the Central Library had to agree to various restrictions. But I was furious too, especially knowing that the Sacher Foundation will not do anything with Brun autographs anyway. The composer's son had handed them over to the Sacher Collection hoping that something would have been published! Sacher was a millionaire! His Archive is, in my opinion, but a "manuscript refrigerator". He had commissioned but one work to Brun (Symphonic Variations for piano and strings"), paying him a little fee of a couple of hundred Francs under condition that the authograph would become his propriety.

During is lifetime, Paul Sacher was a kind of Swiss music mafia boss he had become a much feared person, since he could destroy musical careers of players and critics with whom he had problems. After having performed in a concert, he would contact newspapers redactions to see if there would be a bad review or not, and forbiding it if there was a bad one. At he occasion his 80th birthday, a Siwss musicologist had written a very critical aticle on Sacher, exposing many of his "bad" sides. The article was censored. Apparently, his body-guard and chauffeur always carried a pistol with him. Before Hermann Scherchen was invited to Winterthur as a regular guest conductor, Sacher had written letters to composers an musicians, meaning that "we absolutely don't want this German guy over here" (Scherchen was not a Nazi, he just wanted to leave Germany). And, once everybody had opposed to his mobbing, Sacher continued harrassing Scherchen - even after he had left Winterthur for Lugano. Sacher was just jealous of such a much more better conductor than him.

If one wants to study Sacher autographs, he must travel to Basel and agree not to photocopy anything,  unless it's a famous composer like Stravinsky or Martinu or others, on which a monography ir an essay is being written, needing score pages or excerpts for musical examples.

I could let you have without problems those 3 Hug Symphony PDFs (which I had personally scanned for them before its paper would crumble to dust, due to unprofessional storing or because they were manufactured with cheap paper), but I am sure that after this, those PDFs would appear in short time on ISLMP, with which the publisher and the Brun estate may not agree yet and involve myself into the affair since it is known that I had scanned them. But, in the case of these three scores, "printing copyrights" will expire soon anyway. There are different laws on this subject in different countries, meaning that I may be flexible in supplying :-)
In any case, Brun becomes performing copyright-free in 2029, making things by then much easier.

[Maury]

Thanks Adriano, but nothing you said surprises me except for your Swiss Mafioso. I thought Swiss people were super nicey nice. I would only need a study score as I have no orchestra at my disposal. Are those still currently available from Hug? I can well imagine the expense of individual parts for a symphony.

[eschiss1]

I have never been in the business of uploading scores to IMSLP for which I had doubts about permissions, to my knowledge. As to symphonies 2-4, my  information came, however misleadingly, from Worldcat . Now symphony no.3 seems only to be available at Swiss libraries according to Worldcat - quite a few Swiss libraries - so that may explain the discrepancy; but symphony no.2 is also in the stacks of the Munich library (Bayern State Library), the Royal Danish Library, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, - all of them in the European Union, just not only in Switzerland, but admittedly unlikely to loan his scores out until 2030 if at all (he's still in copyright in 2029, the status does not, to my knowledge, change until 71 years after death. Tangentially the recent-ish change in Canadian copyright law means that composers who died in 1972 or later have a 70/1-year copyright term rather than the 50/1 that applies to composers who died in 1971 or earlier...)

[adriano]

@ Maury
Try to find out my e-mail address from my Website, somewhere not quite openly, it is stated :-)

[Maury]

Adriano,
Thanks very much. Nice to make contact with you after all these years enjoying your recordings. All the best

[Maury]

I am listening to the Brun Symphony box for the second time and just listened to Symphonies 7 and 8. These are perhaps the two loveliest of his symphonies and I wanted to commend the playing of the Moscow Phil and the conducting by Adriano. While I understand there are some better orchestras, these were very sensitive old school performances and I am sorry for whatever negative reviews have been made about this set. I think the musicweb reviews have been more supportive on the whole.

In addition, I was struck by the orchestrations by Brun of 3 songs by Othmar Schoeck originally for voice and piano. What a difference the sensitive orchestrations make! I am admittedly not the biggest fan of combining voice and piano since the voice is highly flexible and the piano is highly inflexible. But in Schoeck's case, because of his ultra romantic style, the piano is particularly constraining. Quixotically I hope someone orchestrates all Schoeck's songs.

PS Happy New Year everyone!

[adriano]

@Maury

Thanks for your comments. David Hurwitz's opinion of Brun's music was:
"Brun's spasmodic syntax must be as frustrating to the musician as to the listener. For penitential souls only."

Better orchestras are more expensive, but may not be interested in such repertoire (unless a big star promotes it), and even would play it reluctantly and, consequently, with inferior results...
Over here in Switzerland this project would have costed almost the double, and the players may have even not liked to play this difficult music. In Moscow and in Bratislava they liked it very much!

There are already various Schoeck song orchestrations on CD, as, for example, by Rolf Urs Ringger (1974/1977) and, just lately by Graziella Contratto. And I have done an arrangement of 9 songs from Schoeck's "Das stille Leuchten" for medium voices and wind quintet, which was performed in Zurich in 1919, at the occasion of Gottfried Keller's 200th birthday. I hoped for a larger ensemble, but the City of Zurich had not enough money for that... Dmitry Ashkenazy was the clarinetist. It was an open-air concert with other arrangements of mine, which was attended by over 1000 persons. It took place in the park near the Villa Wesendonck.

[Maury]

Adriano,
 
 Thank you very much for the additional citations of Schoeck songs that have been orchestrated. Makes a big difference, to me at least. I don't think a full orchestra is required but woodwinds and strings are essential IMO.

 As for Brun, your box set jogged me into a journey of discovery here perhaps to the annoyance of some. What I have termed Poetic Romanticism to distinguish it from High Romanticism, Classical Romanticism and Neo Tristanesque Romanticism, in the event was not a big success with audiences.  Even though there is not much harsh dissonance, languor or bombast about it, audiences and even critics found it puzzling, or their favorite term, enigmatic.

Sibelius Sym 3 which I for years thought of as an inexplicable style change I see now has certain characteristics typical of Poetic Romanticism as does to a lesser extent his Sym 6. It is interesting that Sibelius himself recounted that when talking to Rimsky Korsakov after an early performance of the Sym 3 that Rimsky-Korsakov shook his head and said: 'Why don't you do it the usual way; you will see that the audience can neither follow nor understand this.'

On the surface the Sym 3 seems fairly tidy and normal and almost classical in form with its 3 movements  but the sequential movement of the segments are  atypical and they don't flow in either a straightforward Classical or Romantic way. We can compare it to Prokofiev's Sym 1 which is clear neo-classicism and easy to follow even for average audiences. The Sibelius Sym 3 is not at all like that nor are the other works in this style by Bendix, Hermann, Brun and others.

[Alan Howe]

What I have termed Poetic Romanticism to distinguish it from High Romanticism, Classical Romanticism and Neo Tristanesque Romanticism

There's too much crossover among these terms for them to be at all useful, I'm afraid.

[Gareth Vaughan]

I agree. I'm sorry but they are too personal and lack clear and discrete delineation. I find them confusing rather than helpful. Sorry.

[Ilja]

To be fair, there doesn't have to be a problem with using one's own typology. Where it can become an issue is in the suggestion that the original artists were somehow aware of such categories when they created their works. While this is not unheard of (e.g., composers labeling themselves as "Wagnerites" at some point) most of them would probably see their oeuvre as a continuum. In practical terms, I personally find it most useful to either remain very broad ("romanticism") or very precise (e.g., "late Strauss-influenced") when talking about music. And even then the categorization is entirely my own.

[Alan Howe]

Thanks, gentlemen. And so back to Brun, please.

[Maury]

Let me try again keeping to musical issues. To explain briefly my use of the term Poetic Romanticism (lyric poetry, not narrative) was meant to convey a musical aspect common to certain romantic symphonic works roughly between 1888 and the 1950s. The musical issue is the degree of perceived orderliness from one musical passage to the next within movements. Lyric poetry is rather non linear in its sequence from one thought or image to the next, certainly compared to narrative poetry. The lyric art is creating such sequences that somehow still seem interesting and novel when considered as a totality.

When music has a clear formal structure that is mirrored with the musical content listeners have an easier time grasping it. Shorter harmonically structured melodies are heard as tunes while long complex melodies are heard more as melodiousness. Non linear (less expected) musical sequences within a movement are harder to grasp and the listener spends time puzzling over them rather than continuing to listen without loss of attention.

To loop back to Hurwitz' comment about too much non-linear musical thinking (spasmodic) in Brun's symphonies, it presumably lay behind Rimsky's observation to Sibelius about his Sym 3 being too hard for audiences to understand. Given its modest proportions and circumspect harmonic practice, it seems rather surprising for Rimsky to say that but he was astute. The Sibelius Sym 3 has been his least popular symphony and is rarely performed well either. This is not to say that this kind of music is without value or interest which is the logical leap that Hurwitz makes. Rimsky was more acute in simply saying that audiences were going to have more trouble with following it because of the way that the music was organized.

There is a commonality of sorts with the late chromatic romantic style that was discussed here with Erlanger and the Belle Epoque French opera composers as well as the composers like Schreker, Zemlinsky, Szymanowski.

What these styles of music require of listeners is a certain immersion into them to grasp the totality of the content in a movement and the entire work rather than using certain separable passages as stepping stones to understanding the movement or work as a whole. The practical problem is a Catch 22 process whereby orchestras don't play the works because audiences find them a bit more challenging to grasp and audiences find the works in the style harder to grasp because orchestras don't program them enough.

I am a reasonably experienced musical listener and I noted above that I found it challenging per Rimsky to grasp what Brun and others in this style were doing at first and second listen. It took repeated listening to begin to get comfortable enough to start to make judgments as to the relative success of a given movement or work as a whole given the features of this particular style. I think trying to use the usual normative Romantic works as a basis for comparison here is not apt. Works that seem to fit within "Poetic Romanticism" or late chromatic Romanticism have to be evaluated for the degree of excellence within the character of their respective styles alone. The only fair alternative is to reject the entire style.

I think also we need to see both these styles as based on the observations of talented composers in this time period that the normative Romantic symphonic style after 50 years was becoming increasingly predictable. So this generated various attempts to reintroduce a certain amount of novelty to such works.

[Alan Howe]

I'm afraid I find this analysis completely impenetrable.

My experience with Brun's symphonies is simple: it mainly involves wrestling with the knotty issue of increasing chromaticism. It's a process I find I have to undergo with composers such as Reger, Senfter, Woyrsch, Schoeck, etc. Sometimes I enjoy the hard work of working out what's going on, sometimes I don't.

Regarding, Sibelius, no such 'knotty' difficulty is involved as his harmonic procedures are more obvious and his orchestral palette more distinctive. I have never found his 3rd Symphony at all problematic. I'd say No.6 is a tougher listen, but it has a fabulously luminous quality which is hard to resist.

[adriano]

I too, I don't like picky categorisations of musical works. Especially considering that they came from earlier musicologists who had practically at their disosal only the big "Bs", Vivaldi, Mozart, Haydn and Wagner. Since a few decades, fortunately, an immense unknown/forgotten repertoire came to light.

As far as Brun's attitude towards atonality is concerned, just an example:
On his 5th Symphony - which he considered a "problematic one" since it not only required "intelligent Swiss audiences" but also "an intelligent conductor and many rehearsals" - he wrote:
I am faced with atonality like an enemy, should it end up as desolate paper music, but the knowledge that artists like Stravinsky and Schoeck are dealing with it captivates me greatly." (...)
"I felt the urge to consider chamber music-like writing. It was an elementary need. Intensive studies of Beethoven's late works lead me into it. At the same time I felt concerned with atonality."
This Symphony has a fabuolous, quite dissonant and tense Chaconne as a first movement. It stylistically deviates from the remaining movements, so he even allowed it to be played separately in concerts.