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Hoping Bax fans can help. We know Bax isn't recorded or performed much and his most famous ones dominate a small selection: Tintagel, Garden, Woods, Forest, Pine Trees, Hills, Legend, Symphonies. I'm keen to discover not songs or chamber but other Bax orchestral works. Works that members highly rate and can rant and rave about, especially saying specifically why they like their nomination and any recordings they enjoy (whether or not still in the catalogue).

The Suite in E is a significant small and incomplete work. Its core theme was used by Mahler to end his first symphony.

It would be gr8 to hear how others rate the various conductors/orchestras doing Fibich. Not that his orchestral music should present much of a difficulty to perform or throws up significant scope for interpretation. But discussing the relative merits of the various renditions would help fill in some of the huge conversation on Fibich that a few of us dare think still needs to take place on this site.

There was a reminder every time I posted, because Marek was of my six listed favs. His work is of high quality, sustaining interest by conjuring an appealing, lively magical sound world. Whilst others, like say Bax seem fellow travellers, even among the unsung Marek is little known and badly neglected.

[Hans Rott]

Surely, we should – if a little kid waves, then wave back. But think of a central European composer who is strongly influenced by a small diverse group of the greats and backlashed by musical politics, suffers from depression and feelings of unrequited love, dies young having written just one student symphony, leaves behind a small collection of works, and remains under-recognised, still to make his Proms debut. It's a profile fitting Hans Rott but it's one generation later and Polish, not Austrian. And though the wonderfully-gifted Karłowicz has been waving frantically down all the years, few have waved back.

Just as Rott's fav composers (Bruckner, Wagner, Brahms and Schumann) make guest appearances in his symphony, so do those of Karłowicz in Returning Waves (especially Tchaikovsky and Wagner). Both composers share an interest in structure which is infused with chaos. And just as the second half of Rott's symphony is beset with tell-tale signs of deteriorating mental health and life problems so too Karłowicz betrays his disturbed mindset, both in the thematic narratives he selects and in the music he writes. The Sorrowful Tale portrays suicide; My Soul is Sad – is the name of one of his songs (along with all his music: well worth hearing). Whilst love and death are certainly linked themes running through culture, in Karłowicz these tend towards overdrive. Typically, euphoria in Karłowicz follows heart-rending anguish, as in The Rebirth Symphony although there are exceptions, such as the poignant-free pretty little frolic through his Serenade for Strings.

That Returning Waves is a mood-swinger is established from the sombre melancholy opening that breaks into a sparkling and restlessly delightful melodic parade of fleeting scenes (never settling, like say in Debussy's Images) and proceeds towards the inevitable fatalistic close (Waving and Drowning?).These returning waves punctuate the episodic music which keeps coming back at you, though arguably the cyclic form is overdone to the point of being pre-film music. Returning Waves seems his most overtly bipolar work but shares with his others (especially his other tone poems) glorious orchestration of lovely tunes. Returning Waves may not be his best work (the Violin Concerto draws the most raves) but it holds the ear's attention and contains plenty of colour, turbulence and pathos. For me, it is an unsung masterwork.

Today is the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great unsung Belgian composer Guillaume Lekeu, who died of lemon sorbet poisoning in 1894 and hasn't been heard at the Proms for over a century. Here, Ophélie's hauntingly pretty, fresh-faced love theme for Hamlet struggles against ominous hints of a unrequited and tragic future. Hamlet's tragedy was losing Ophélie despite Lekeu giving her one of the best love themes in all orchestral music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTxNtO-0wMo

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen promoting unsung composers. The fun and joy in Florence Price's well-crafted, free-flowing Mississippi River Suite celebrates its African-American spiritual roots in a melodic cruise that paints in exuberant sound the passing shoreline cultures.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfdvCrqzTm0

There's a huge conversation still to take place on this site about Fibich's music. His tunes and orchestration are superb, his output vast across the musical genres and his life story is fascinating.

I can't find any unsung Richard Strauss orchestral music as good as his well-known works. Is there any?

Originality is an issue not always treated with sufficient respect or understanding, perhaps because we crave basking in the light of a creative individual personality while being held prisoner by the collective conformity. 'Derivative' always seems to be used as a disparaging term and yet the originality we now commend was often attacked when first played. Yes, originality has value but that isn't sufficient in itself nor does it guarantee quality or satisfaction. Indeed, some of the original noise-type modern "music" I've heard is the least enjoyable. Like Isaac Newton, composers stand on the shoulders of giants. What they write is heavily influenced by what was composed before them. And it has been possible for different composers to write the same or similar tune completely independently, just as two scientists can make the same discovery. We experience the same world but know that we see and hear it differently. So, we are bothered when paintings or music by different people look or sound the same (and yet, perversely, object when it is too different!). Pieces are mostly called unoriginal in relation to tunes, rather than structures, or instrumental combination and colour or the story-lines of a work. The tunes of other composers can be recycled deliberately for a variety of reasons, but the context of their setting and their orchestration may still be original. There is usually a natural pattern to completing the start of a phrase, like the way we can finish other people's sentences, which can produce similar sounding music almost by itself.

Anyone who knows the ending of Mahler 1 who wants to actually hear Rott's Suite in E is welcome to email me for the MP3s of the OOP recording: pbarasi54@btinternet.com - although it will cost you 13MB + ideally also getting it on this site's downloads if, unlike me, you are savvy enough to do that.

Hi matesic, Of course it's speculative and no, I wasn't writing this as a sourced research paper. I've seen no evidence to support my view that Rott's 3rd and 4th movements of his symphony were biographical narrative. All I can do is read his biography, listen to the music and match what I hear with when it was written. For instance, the Scherzo was written away from Louise and Vienna during his summer holiday in Neustift am Walde between July 3 and September 13, 1879. This was after he had fallen in love with Louise and before he had declared himself to her. As it happened, he wasn't allowed to marry her but given that he was without means and reputation and she was 17, it was a fairly obvious fear for Rott to have at that time that he wouldn't be allowed to marry her. In the Scherzo I hear a Viennese Ball, a love theme, and his frustration with rejection and in the finale, his ultimate gaining of recognition alongside Wagner, Bruckner (start & end of 5th Symphony last movement) and Brahms, who he quotes, with the ending described by others as ascending into Valhalla.

We can't know for sure what Mahler actually thought even from what he said, like anyone else. But calling Rott and himself "Two fruits from the same tree" gives room for suspecting he thought he had a right to pick some of Rott's fruit. Sometimes it's suggested Mahler didn't deliberately use Rott's music: it was just in the air of Vienna. Mahler knew music backwards and anything he used from other composers was intentional and held purpose and meaning for him. I believe Rott, both as a personality and as a source of music, had significance for Mahler. Whilst I'm sure I'm not alone, to believe that isn't proof of course. On "Memorial" – then quoting Paul Banks, this is an odd conjunction as he wrote that Mahler "enshrined the memory of his friend in his own music". To me, that is a memorial, described by the guy who rediscovered the score, although I can understand if others think I've stretched his meaning.

For anyone wanting to read about Mahler's use at the end of his 1st symphony of the core theme from Rott's Suite n E, Internationale Hans Rott Gesellschaft DIE QUARTE No 2/2005 is still available: www.hans-rott.org/die-quarte/DIE%20QUARTE%20-%20THE%20FOURTH%20II_2005.pdf 

The Suite is OOP, recorded just the once: Hermus/Philharmonische Orchestra/Accousence ACO-CD 20305
(Alan can email me if he wants to put the MP3s on our site)

I've everything of Sten I could get my hands on (inc Tirfing, the Song, theatre music, above all the BiS box of symphonies & piano concertos). But  I wasn't sufficiently impressed with the excerpts to get this one, which sounds like Wagnerian pastiche of less than the usual standard. Doubtless others will get many hours of enjoyment from it.

This discussion is like going back to the beginning again: it contains biographical and musical inaccuracies and I'm sure much of the ground has already been covered correctly on this site.

On biography, Rott wasn't about to marry Louise and that was a highly significant factor among many which led to his mental illness. The roots of his collapse accumulated over a few years and Brahms and the train was merely the final trigger. Possibly the heavy use of triangle in the symphony was even resembling a sound he kept hearing in his head back as early as 1878. He found out about his illegitimacy very late and that was among the traumatic blows, rejection and lack of recognition that marked his life. Though Mahler was mixed up, he could cope with whatever happened; Rott was more highly strung and never could.

On the Music, Mahler deliberately quoted from Rott and did so more than from any other composer and he continued to do so throughout the Mahler symphonic cycle. Yes, Mahler 2 does make significant play of Rott, around the resurrection theme but most interesting is Mahler's 1st. For this is the only one in which Mahler draws from a second Rott work, the Suite in E, which builds in the finale and rounds off the symphony with the standing bell horns chorale.

Mahler was not plagiarising but recycling Rott as a memorial to a sometime friend, and as a monument to Rott's ideas. For though each had a different style and clearly had Rott lived what we have would be regarded as very early and rudimentary, nevertheless Mahler was impressed both by Rott's tunes and by his structural and other ideas. We hear Rott stalking through the Mahler cycle with brass fanfares, over-brief love theme, ghost waltz, mixing beauty with banality, bird sounds, etc. And Mahler never just took a Rott theme but transformed it and often ran two tunes together.

Mahler was most taken with the second half of Rott's symphony and with Rott's treatment of Wagnerian quotes, with his own 1st echoing Rott's Lohengrin underscoring and elsewhere, Rott's take on the Siegfried Idyll & Brunhilde's awakening. This second half of Rott's symphony is significant for turning into a personal narrative, the Scherzo as an imagined fantasy of a Viennese Ball with Louise in which he totally loses it emotionally, and which is quite prophetic of what then happened in real life, and the finale in which he imagines gaining recognition as a composer. Mahler in turn used some narrative in his symphonies but whereas the identity of his hero is attributed to being himself, probably it is a merged character of Rott and himself. Mahler took Rott's early death quite badly but then, his life was surrounded by death and he obsessed with this. Rott also obsessed over death and many of the poems he set for his songs had this has an important theme.

Finally, whilst Rott's symphony is undoubtedly his most important work, we have many others which have been performed and recorded.

Three obstructions to the quality of unsungs are: brand name recognition, marketability, and the immense total number of compositions. Most of the big names produced a large output: enough to stuff concert halls & recordings. Just the number of unsung symphonies is remarkable. The total amount when all unsung music is added in is incredible (and there's even more than showing when works that were never published or disappeared/destroyed are included). Has anyone tried to quantify this by number of works, or duration, or how long it might take to listen to it all - even restricting this to our site's cut-off dates? Or your own collection: CDs that you haven't ever played or not heard for years, or thought you didn't rate but now could do. What gems may there be waiting to be unearthed? Then there is our own cheating with unsungs: yes, unsung composers and works to the world but not with ourselves. For us, unsung is what we don't play.

Now, I must confess that a great deal of my CD buying has been risky, prompted by the composer/work being treated as unsung and the thrill of discovering something really good. Inevitably, there is a fair bit I consider to be duds but I would guess a good majority is to me of reasonable to high quality and interest.