Walter Bricht: Orchestral Music, Volume One

The Austrian composer Walter Bricht (1904–70) – reportedly Franz Schmidt’s favourite student – was one of many musicians of Jewish ancestry who fled Vienna after the Anschluss for the safety of the USA; Bricht became a treasured professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. Fittingly, it is the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, also in Indiana, that has made the first album of Bricht’s music, in its own debut recording, thereby rescuing a major, and echt-Viennese, voice from eight decades of silence, and revealing a late-Romantic musical language that, like Schmidt’s, unites Baroque counterpoint, a Classical sense of form and Wagnerian chromatic harmony.

Fort Wayne Philharmonic
Andrew Constantine, conductor