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  On their opening concert of the season on the 16th November, The Isle of Wight Symphony Orchestra will be giving a rare performance of the above work, which dates from 1902 and was often played at Sir Henry Wood's Promenade Concerts early last century. The young soloist will be Tmiothy Ridout, winner of the Lionel Tertis International Competition in 2016. Other works in the concert comprise  Sibelius's Karelia Suite and Wlly Walton's fine First Symphony. Tickets, costing £15, are obtainable via the Orchestra's web site at www.iwso.co.uk. I cannot guarantee that, due to present health problems, I will be there, but I hope to make it. By the way the concert's venue will be The Medina Theatre, Newport Isle of Wight.
     Cheers,
           John.

Franz Lachner's 2nd & 4th symphonies are available in manuscript form on the Internet at IMSLP  & at a German web site whose name escapes me*. I have tried downloading and printing off some movements for No 4, but, with my poor eyesight these days, I find them extremely hard to read and have given up attempting to copy them into Sibelius score writing software. Around 20 years ago, when my eyesight was a lot better, I managed to copy the whole of Spohr's 2nd symphony from a manuscript facsimile into Noteworthy software 7, more recently, I copied Lachner's 6th and 3rd symphonies from printed originals into Sbelius(including that huge boob I made on the metronome marking of the slow movement of the latter!). However,now well into my 89th year, I feel I can no longer attempt such a task. Therefore, If any member of this forum who has any of the score writing softwares such as Finale, Sibelius,or Notion or even the much less expensive Noteworthy, which I used for a good number of yeas before I could afford anything more expensive, and if wish to give us some new unheard music from Franz Lachner,could please volunteer to have a go at it? Remember, once you've got your score into any one othese softwares, you can not only hear a rough a ready version of the music but  writing out the individual instrumental parts becomes a doddle. I was able to do that with Noteworthy to get the orchestral parts for my own 2nd symphony for a private performance back in 2002.
Anyone who wishes to take on above challenge will have my full support, as much as
I can give.
      Cheers
           John
*Try Munchener Digitalisierungzentrum or MDZ,
         

Please does anyone know of the whereabouts of any printed copies of the scores of Lachner's Symphonies numbers 2, 4 or 7? I recently donloaded what appears to be the composer,s manuscript of the first 3 movements of No4, but the writing is so difficult to follow that that, with my poor eyesight, I've decided to give up trying to copy it out.
     Cheers,
           John

I see that Barry Sterndale Bennett, one of the composer's descendants, has written an article on Sir William Sterndale  Bennett and is to embark on a lecture tour of some recorded music clubs in England.
    It would be great to hear his 6th piano concerto played live to celebrate his bicentenary but I gather that someone who came into the manuscript of the score by marriage into the Sterndale Bennett family is still "sitting" on it and won't let anyone see it.
      Cheers,
             John.

I see that the BBC has at last woken up to Sir William Sterndale Bennett's existence and is devoting the Composer of the Week slot at 12 noon and 6.30 pm to his music this coming week on Radio 3, Wednesday being his 200th birthday.
    Cheers,
          John.

The BBC is in the process of promoting a set of ten orchestral pieces to get school pupils interested in music. It would be interesting to find out which 10 pieces various members of this forum would choose. I would suggest that at least half of them should come from  unsung composers.

Next Saturday 24th January the Isle of Wight Symphony Orchestra, under their conductor Jonathan Butcher, will be including a performance of the York Bowen Viola Concerto with the young Spanish Violist Loreno Canto Wolteche as soloist, in their all English programme. The other works in the concert are Vaughan Williams's Wasps Overture and Elgar's 2nd Symphony. This takes place at their usual venue, the Medina Theatre, Newport, Isle of Wight. Tickets, at £14, are obtainable from the Theatre box office whose phone number is 01983 823884
   I cannot say that I am familiar with any of York Bowen's music, but I might go along just to support our local band.

Some years ago when, courtesy of Alan and the Tyroler Landesmuseen, we were introduced to the splendid orchestral music of Johann Rufinatscha, we were led to believe that he had written 6 symphonies. Recordings of Nos 1, 2. 5 & 6 were at that time issued by the Landesmuseen, together with an indication of two further works of the same genre known as Nos 3 & 4, either lost or incomplete. Now we are told that one of these never happened and that the last two symphonies need to be re-numbered 4 & 5 respectively. What I would like to know is (a) did the composer himself refer to his last two symphonies as No5 & 6  and (b) how did the rumour of this "phantom" symphony come about?

I tend to take the "Classical Period" in western music as stretching from around 1770 to 1820, this being followed for the rest of the 19th Century by the "Romantic Period". However, I realise that there cannot be any exact cut off dates for either style of music and there must have been quite a considerable overlap between them.
  It might be argued that, say in the case of the symphony. classical composers were more concerned with conforming to a fixed set of compositional rules and producing beauty of form, whereas the Romantics were more into expressing emotions. How then does one classify Haydn's "Sturm und Drang" symphonies or the Andante cantabile of Mozart's last great symphony, nicknamed "Jupiter"? It might be argued that Schubert's B minor unfinished symphony was in the romantic mode whilst the "Great C Major Symphony" that followed it was back in the Classical tradition.
  It might be said that composers whose style was "Classical" tended to be conservative or reactionary whereas those who embraced the Romantic mode were avant garde or revolutionary. Personally, I would class Spohr as a Conservative romantic, whilst Beethoven was an avant garde classicist! I should imagine the musical upheavals of the 1st 30 years of the 19th Century must have left many lesser known composers not knowing which way to turn.
    I hope this post will now stir up a healthy debate amongst us!

Hello folks,
   If you tune in to 3 Breakfast on BBC Radio 3 tomorrow,( 2nd April ) around 8.30 am you may hear something from one of his symphonies to celebrate Franz Lachner's 212th birthday.
   

I've lately been reading some of Robert Schumann's writings on composers and music in which he mention's Gottfried Preyer's entry in the Vienna symphony competition of 1834 as having been performed a number of times in Vienna having been published in full score.  As Schumann was writing his piece about it in 1839 and the composer lived on until 1901 it would seem that he would have had plenty of time to write further symphonies if he were so inclined.  So far I've found little about him in Wikipedia and in IMSLP he is only represented by the score of a double fugue for keyboard dedicated to his teacher , Simon Sechter.  I'm wondering if there are still copies of the above mentioned symphony gathering dust in some library or other and whether there just be any further orchestral music surviving from this composer.

I've just been listening to some clips from the works of Philip Spratley taken from a recently issued CD from Toccata Classics. This includes his 3rd symphony and a selection of other orchestral pieces. I find all this music very much to my somewhat conservative taste and, in my opinion, he is well suited to be numbered amongst our late romantic unsung composers. The good news is that he is still very much alive and composing, having been born in Nottinghamshire in 1942, making him 11 years younger than myself.

Now that today I've reached my 83rd milestone and I note that I've just been promoted to senior membership of this  august forum, I'm wondering if, (a) I'm the oldest member and (b) there are any composers who were born on the 5th of February.

I should like to submit Franz Lachner's String Quintet in C minor, Op 121 for this honour. It's so different from the sublime C major Quintet of his good friend Franz Schubert, but its dramatic character ought surely earn it a place alongside that one in the 2 cello quintet repertoire.

I think I asked this question a few years back but, since then, quite a number of Knowledgeable new members have joined this forum. All I know is that Franz Lachner carried off the first prize with his massive 5th symphony and that Otto Nicolai came second with his one and only symphony. Ferdinand Ries's 7th symphony, entered by a publisher friend without the composer's permission, apparently came "nowhere", despite, IMHO, being of similar merit to the afore mentioned works. I'd love to know about some of the other 50 odd composers who took part and how they fared in that contest. Maybe some German Speaking member with access to the Vienna Music Friends archives could shed some light on this query of mine.

The 40th annual issue of the Spohr  Journal is out now. It contains, amongst other articles, a history of the publication of Spohr's 4 clarinet concertos together with a full discography of them extending over 2 A4 pages. I had no idea they had been recorded so many times, yet they still remain a great rarity in the concert hall. Anyone interested in joining the Spohr Society of Great Britain, should get in touch with the secretary Chris Tutt( chtsheffield@yahoo.co.uk) Annual subs. work out at £7 for UK, £9 or 10 Euros for EU countries and £12 or 20 US dollars for the rest of the world, for which you get 4 Quarterly newsletters, together with the afore mentioned slim Journal.

Franz Lachner's Wind Quintet is due to feature in Radio 3's Three Breakfast around 8.15 am on Monday 25th November. I had suggested the Adagio from his quartet in E minor, Op. 173, but it seems they didn't have that recording to hand.

The Radio 3 Breakfast progamme has been asking listeners for the past 2 or 3 weeks to nominate pieces by lesser known composers for including in their 7 to 9am slot. I reckon the average length of each item they play is around 10 minutes.
The email address to get to the presenters is "3breakfast@bbc.co.uk". No doubt you've guessed which composer I've asked for!

I was adding his Concertino for Horn, Bassoon and Orchestra to the Wikipaedia list of his works when I noticed that it appeared to share the same opus number (Op.43) with his first surviving string quartet. I wonder if anyone can shed any light on this apparent duplication. Whilst on the subject of Ignaz Lachner, I seem to remember reading somewhere that he wrote a special symphony for children, no doubt on similar lines to Leopold Mozart's Toy Symphony. It would also be interesting to know if any other orchestral works of his have survived.

I'm thinking of people like Johann Pachelbel (Canon), Henry Litolff (Scherzo from Concerto Symphonique No 4), Otto Nicholai ( Merry Wives of Windsor Overture) and I can't even remember the name of the chap who wrote The Entry of the Gladiators. I know that Litolff  wrote 4 more concertos symphonique and Nicholai's 1st symphony was runner up to Lachner's 5th in the 1834 competition held by the Vienna Friends of Music, but what happened to the rest of these composers' repertoire? Surely they must have written something else worth hearing.  Maybe someone can add more names to the above list or suggest sources of scores or recordings from their largely unsung musical output.