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Yes, I saw the Cliffe/Delius concert reviewed in The Times and it certainly had "Dutton" stamped all over it didn't it? Looks like Sterling might have missed out on that one...

Yes, you are right Alan - but I always get them confused too!

This a mouthwatering in prospect, Alan. Do you know how cpo will couple their symphonies/violin concerto CDs? Presumably Nos.1&3 that we already know about,  another pair of symphonies and then the final symphony plus the Violin Concerto?

I think this is Le Sélam which, although Reyer (1823-1909) called it an Oriental Symphony, is really more of a cantata as it is a large scale (30-40 minute long) choral work with, IIRC, a narrator too. It is clearly inspired by Felicien David's Le Désert. It's a melodic and effective work, safely exotic for Victorian audiences, and very French.

Reyer himself was primarily an opera composer. I have recently acquired recordings of his most famous work, Sigurd, a spectacular grand opera in the Meyerbeer tradition and also Salammbo, which is pretty similar. He has a gift for melody and colourful orchestration which is very appealing and I'm surprised that these three works aren't better known. Well worth exploring.

It's always difficult coming to a debate like this when so many of the points which I thought of initially when I read Peter's post have already been addressed so well. Alan's point about the memorability of material (how tuneful is it?) is very well made and certainly I think is very relevant amongst the listening public. Martin's about the satisfaction to performers of playing a particular work had never occurred to me but I can quite see now that it has an important role to play in deciding a composer's eventual fate. As a choral singer in a modest combo, I can certainly empathise with it. There are works which audiences love and we dislike signing. The conductor soon gets the message and drops them from our repertory.

My contribution to this discussion is going to be rather woolly, I'm afraid. Let's forget about the also rans who were always going to be also rans (no, no nominees from me ) and also the towering geniuses who were always in the end going to be recognised, no matter how long it took (Schubert might be a case in point). Consider the composers on the margin, those highly competent craftsmen who, from time to time, managed to produce a work, or a whole series of works which rose above the technically skilled and exhibited a touch of genius. Maybe Saint-Saëns and Raff might be a good pair to look at. Personally, I'd rank them pretty much on a par, maybe Raff on a slightly higher plane, but I'm not going to argue about it.

So why is Saint-Saëns still played quite frequently and his Organ Symphony is a concert staple, when Raff even now has to struggle for a hearing and his two greatest symphonies are still largely unknown?

I'd contend that it's mostly luck. Saint-Saëns had the luck to be born in France and so became the only really significant orchestral and chamber music composer in that then opera-obsessed country. France needed Saint-Saëns. Raff had to compete with Brahms, Wagner and a host of other similarly excellent composers in the German-speaking world which, in consequence, culturally didn't need him. Saint-Saëns had the luck to lived a very long life (he died in 1920 or so) and, although his reputation had declined around the same time as Raff's, the fact that he was still around meant that his music carried on being performed. Raff was dead at sixty, just as his reputation went into cyclical decline and suddenly there was no reason to perform him any more. Saint-Saëns outlived the rise of nationalism in music and lived long enough to see a return to his brand of classicism. Raff, just a smuch a classicist, died just as nationalism in the shapes of Tchaikovsky, Dvorak and Grieg arrived on the scene to make his music look very staid. Saint-Saëns had the luck to have successors whose compositions were not much of an advance on his own, whereas Raff's symphonies were eclipsed by Brahms' and his stylistic ethos was overtaken by the New-German chromaticism of Liszt and Wagner. Raff had the ill fortune to be caught in the political no man's land between the Liszt-Wagner camp and the traditionalist camp, whereas in France Saint-Saëns could stay out of the debate more easily. It was Raff's misfortune to be born poor and stay poor for most of his life, so he had to write many pot-boiler piano and duo works to keep the wolf from the door. This damaged the standing of his more "serious" music. Saint-Saëns  was born into a prosperous middle class family and money doesn't seem to have been too much of a problem, so his oeuvre is untainted by the whiff of the salon. And so on...

I don't want to labour the point and no doubt holes could be picked in my argument, but in essence I'm saying: tough luck. Posterity's verdict is undeserved in some cases and we do our level best to put things right, but in the cases of many fine unsung composers we shouldn't look for anything more complicated than bad luck.

Peter asked how an unsung composer was defined and Alan answered. I can say where the phrase came from. My son Edward, who is a very bight fellow, coined it when I asked him to describe the sort of composers I'm interested in, eager as I was to avoid pejorative words or clumsy phrases like "unjustly neglected" or "forgotten". I liked it's terseness, aptness and the pun...

On reflection, I think that you are both right! Like Alan, I see no problem with repeating threads in this new setting and that's particularly valuable when you have new members like Peter, who can add valuable insights not present in the earlier thread.

On the other hand, there's no denying that the old Forums did represent a very significant archive of knowledge and opinion and I still intend, when time permits, to try and make them available in an archive format. They certainly won't be available as active threads here I'm afraid because of format incompatibilities.

The key phrase in that last paragraph, by the way, is when time permits. Don't go holding your breath, now!

I have a poor radio recording of Godard's Symphonie Orientale. It's in five movements, named: I. Les Éléphants II. Chinoiserie III. Sara la Baigneuse IV. Le rêve de la Nikia V. Marche Turque. You can probably imagine what it's like, but let's just say that it's not a German symphony!

As for Raff's lost E minor Symphony, Raff probably destroyed it, retaining just the two movements which later appeared in the Suite for Orchestra No.1. Considering how rare it is to find a manuscript of even a published Raff work (because he placed no value on them himself), it's highly unlikely that it'll ever come to light.

[Heinrich Hofmann]

I'd happily subscribe to John's list and add some more arch-romantic suggestions of my own (in no particular order):

Heinrich Hofmann's Frithjof Symphony
Julius Rietz's Symphony No.3 (but Nos.1&2 would be nice too)
Julius Otto Grimm's Symphony
Emil Hartmann's symphonies
Alfred Hill's unrecorded symphonies
Hugo Ulrich's Symphonie Triomphale
August Klughardt's symphonies
Bronsart's symphonies (if they were ever found)
Jean Louis Nicodé's Gloria! Symphony
Schnyder van Wartensee's unrecorded symphonies
Frederick Cowen's unrecorded symphonies
Frederic Cliffe's Symphony No.2
Zygmunt Noskowski's three symphonies
Zygmunt Stojowski's Symphony
Philip Scharwenka's symphonies

und so weiter...

p.s. Alan and I obviously drink at the same well

The Reinthaler opera was broadcast recently on German radio, having been produced in Erfurt this year. It's a moderately effective piece, conservative in form and orchestration for its date, which is catchily melodious in places. It should appeal to anyone who likes Bruch or Raff.

Thanks for the suggestion, Peter. I'll get back to you when I've thoought through the practicalities.

Personal Messages (PMs) work fine, as you will by now have seen, Jim.

I'll repeat for everyone's benefit the way to turn a word or phrase in your post into a hyperlink:

So that you can see the code, I've substituted "$$$" for the code "url".

1. In the post, as you are writing it, select the word or phrase which you want to turn into a hyperlink and click the globe button. You'll see that it is now preceded "url" in square brackets and followed by "/url" in square brackets, thus:

[$$$]Your link here[/$$$]

2. Now type "=" after the first "url" and then your link address, in this case "www.raff.org", thus:

[$$$=www.raff.org]Your link here[/$$$]

Replacing the $$$" with "url", this becomes:

Your link here

3. That's it!

I do have a number of John Kersey's recordings.

Disregard the music for the moment and concentrate of the more mundane issues. These are not commercially produced CDs mass produced from a glass master. They are CD-Rs burned using a PC or a CD duplicator. So, they may not work on all CD players and will become damaged or deteriorate more easily. The labels are stuck on rather than printed, the insert appears to be printed using a laser or inkjet printer and they are supplied in a thin CD case, which has no spine or back insert. The sound quality can vary from moderately acceptable to surprisingly poor with a level of hiss akin to an old cassette recording. Finally, the tracking, especially of the older CDs in the "archive" series, can be ungenerous so that a whole set of six pieces is tracked as one long track rather than six short ones.

So, bearing mind the price and these limitations which set the series apart from a normal commercial release, the first decision is: "am I sufficiently interested in the repertoire to put aside these negatives?". If the answer is yes, then John Kersey's performing style is another important factor. Gareth, in another thread, describes it as "uninvolved" and that is spot on. Personally I quite like the fact that he lets the music speaks for itself and doesn't impose his personality, but it really is a mater of taste. He plays the notes very well, but also lacks warmth. Each CD on Kersey's site has one track which you can listen to and you do get a fair idea of his pianistic style from them.

So, what of the music itself? Overall, he has done us all a tremendous service unearthing these forgotten piano works, many of them with Klaus Tischendorf's help and support. Of the recordings which I have, particular favourites are the two discs of music by Heinrich von Sahr, who has a very individual voice, quite unlike the "Schumann with water" of so many of his now obscure contemporaries, such as Adolph Bergt, whose music didn't impress me much. On the other hand, the Bargiel works are as worthwhile as you'd expect them to be, particularly the three movement Piano Sonata.

Kersey's two CDs of Jensen show that he had real poetry and I enjoyed the works very much, although there isn't much meat on some of them. The Kirchner CDs  showcase works which on the whole are pretty but slight and after 20 or so such numbers the ear does wander. This is a typical problem with these compilations; many of these CDs aren't really good for listening to all the way through more than once.

Although I have the Kullak recording, Peter, I can't remember what I thought about either the Symphony or the Piano Sonata, which maybe is a comment in itself!

The other CDs I'd mention as being worth exploring are those with the music of Heinrich Hofmann (deliciously sweet and melodious, if rather shallow), Salomon Jadassohn, Emil Hartmann (I don't have the latest recording), Ludvig Schytte and Carl Reinecke. I found the Huber works worthy but dull and the Cowen slight in the extreme. I haven't heard the last four or five CDs: Röntgen, Hiller, Heller, Emil Hartmann and Mendelssohn.

Personally, I'm prepared to disregard the very real limitations of this series for music that I'm really curious to hear, but I'm a completist. If you are only slightly curious about these works then you'd probably be better spending your money on something about which you feel more passionately.

Slightly off-topic I'm afraid, but maybe Alan will allow me, just this once 

As we frequently do, my wife and I went to a CBSO concert at Birmingham's Symphony Hall on Wednesday. I don't know why we chose an afternoon concert, really, as our experience of them is that, although we are in our 50s, we are always amongst the youngest there. The packed audiences seem to be largely composed of coach parties (here they are at the interval). I probably sound both ageist and snobbish here, but it's clear that the management know their market and as a result the programming is usually unadventurous, with the performances often safe and unexciting to boot.

So it proved on Wednesday. The first half was Freddy Kemf's colourless and tepid interpretation of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto under the baton of Vassily Sinaisky (of whom I'd never heard). Things improved marginally in the second half with a sprightlier Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony but, although there was plenty of polish this being the CBSO, there was no individuality or vitality to the performance. It was more like an conductor-less run-through. As my mother would have said: "very nice, thank you dear".

Then came the change of gear. The final piece was Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini. The transformation was utterly spellbinding. Their numbers doubled, the CBSO played as if their lives depended on it, Sinaisky started actually conducting, rather than merely beating the time, the storms and fires of hell raged with an almost painful intensity, the lovers' music was as meltingly lyrical as one could hope it to be and, wonder of wonders, the previously torpid audience sat up and got involved in the performance. I loved it.

So what was it? The weird programming of passion-overloaded Tchaikovsky after classically reserved Mendelssohn? A piece which stretched the orchestra after two they could play on autopilot? A simple increase in volume because there were 100 players on stage after only 60? The effect of a Russian conductor performing Russian music?

I don't know, but I came away thinking both what an odd programming juxtaposition it was and how glad I was for it. Does my experience ring any bells?

A rather "flat" review, I thought, for three works which I wasn't over-impressed with when I first played the CD but which, in the case of Nos.2 & 3 particularly, have grown on me over the intervening months. The Third is a pretty fine work overall.

As for quoting the review in full, Jim, I think a simple link and summary would have sufficed and especially as I know that Len Mullenger is rightly very protective of his copyright. So I've changed your post accordingly.

On different days you get different answers from me but overall Alan has pre-empted me by writing pretty much what I would have written. Nos. 2-5 show Raff at his best.

Amongst the Seasons quartet though, the Spring, Summer and Autumn symphonies are let down for me only by their finales whereas, in contrast to Alan, I still find only the slow movement funeral march of the Sixth Symphony a really convincing piece of work. Isolated movements of some other symphonies are touched with genius too but overall I relegate the First, Seventh and Eleventh, enjoyable though they are, to the status of definite also-rans.

That said, overall the Symphony No.5 Lenore would be my choice if I had to narrow it down to one. The soaring, joyful first movement and the tender, sexy second are perfect illustrations of different aspects of love and the finale is as sure footed and downright exciting a piece of programme music as anything in the Sinfonie Fantastique. Sure, the third movement march sounds a bit simplistic on a recording but it's very effective in the concert hall, and the Trio section is a wonderfully tragic evocation of separation which comes as a shock in the middle of all that military triumphalism. The whole work has all of Raff's characteristic melodiousness and imaginative orchestration whilst still needing quite modest forces. To cap it all, it concludes with that serene and increasingly ethereal apotheosis which, even after knowing the work for almost forty years, seldom fails to move me.