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
Listen To This Recording:
-
Symphonic Suite in A minor, Op. 25 (1931)
- I Unruhig bewegt, schwankend
- II Sehr langsam und ausdrucksvoll
- III Rasch
- I Fliessend
- II Langsam und zart
- III Stürmisch bewegt
- IV Rasch und leicht
- V Sehr langsam
- VI Fliessend
- VII Langsam, ausdrucksvoll
- VIII Rasch
- I Mässig bewegt
- II Langsam
- III Intermezzo scherzando. Nicht zu rasch
- IV Finale. Ziemlisch langsam Bewegt
Verwehte Blätter (‘Scattered Leaves’): Eight Small Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 18b (1932)
Symphony in A minor, Op. 33 (1934)
FIRST RECORDINGS, MADE IN CONCERT
MusicWeb International :
‘The woodwind is attentively communicated to the listener and this must surely be down to the engineers and the conductor, not to mention the orchestra.
These performances and recordings excavate tonal late-romantic music with the accent, lisp and slur of Franz Schmidt’s orchestral work.’
—Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International