Leopold Damrosch: Orchestral Music

The Prussian-born conductor-composer Leopold Damrosch (1832–85) built his reputation through the orchestra he founded in Breslau, emigrating in 1871 to the USA, where he founded a number of important musical institutions in New York and became chief conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. These spirited student performances reveal that the same sense of adventure informed his own music, heard here in its first recordings. At the heart of his only symphony, which sits between Brahms and Wagner, is a dark and powerful funeral march. The disc opens with a jubilant overture which takes an excited lead from Wagner’s Meistersingers and closes with a bonne bouche in the form of Damrosch’s orchestration of a Schubert favourite.

Azusa Pacific University Symphony Orchestra; Christopher Russell, conductor