also re Straesser of possible interest, recent uploads to IMSLP-
Symphony no.1 (http://imslp.org/wiki/Symphony_No.1,_Op.22_(Straesser,_Ewald)) and
Symphony no.2 (http://imslp.org/wiki/Symphony_No.2,_Op.27_(Straesser,_Ewald))
(not by me :) )
I have off air dubs of both these pieces and they are impressive late-romantic, but not gargantuan, works. Well worth getting to know. Thanks, Eric.
I gather there's been a recording (also broadcast, not commercial) somewhere of the 3rd symphony (in A?) (unpublished?) too, no idea if his other three or more symphonies have been performed since their premieres back in the 1930s or published though... I very much like the two (of five?) quartets I've heard and the look of the scores of the rest of the music :)
And giving sym 2 another look I like the opening of the Commodo, grazioso e con anima finale - do hope someone gets around to recording these two or all 6... in the couple of years between sym. 1 and sym. 2 I feel like a hint of Reger has mixed in with the Strauss and Brahms, but I'm just considering the score (and inching backwards from the sound of the quartet he published seven years later, which differs in style of Romanticism from the one he published in 1901... still recommending both of those to such as haven't heard them, both quite good, the 1901 one suggesting Brahms a bit to my ears and the quartet no.4 again admitting other influences too, reminding me maybe a little of Zemlinsky and others still? Don't know...)
Grateful for these occasional wonderful discoveries, as ever.
Eric
A considerable amount of this web site is picked up by Google. I would suggest that anyone starting a topic uses the FULL name of the composer and dates. It is easier for the Google search engine and brings new people to our web site. Straesser is only known to the cognoscenti.
How about an upload of those dubs, Mark? Sounds interesting. All I have is his Piano Concerto in e, but it's a kind of come-on for more......
Jerry
Jerry, leave it with me for a couple of days...
Thank you, Mark, for these wonderful pieces! I'd never even heard of this composer before.
I'm sure this idea has been bruited on this site before (I may even have bruited it myself), but shouldn't there be a place here for non-British unsung composer downloads the way there is for British ones? Subject to approval, I'd be happy to take on this project. What do people think? Is it feasible?
Oh, that would be a wonderful idea, for me especially if anyone could be kind enough to upload music by Prince Heinrich XXIV Reuss of Köstritz, who was I think the subject of my first (of not many!) posting on here. I know he isn't supposed to be very original at all but I am still terribly curious! :)
But I might be being a bit cheeky to ask really, as I know I am not a very frequent visitor here or a very active contributor. :-[
What I was clumsily trying to say, Jerfilm, is that there should be a centralized spot on this site where all the participants could upload otherwise unavailable recordings (preferably radio checks, or copies of long-deleted commercial recordings) of unsung composers outside of the British Isles, as there is now for British composers. If there's any interest, and if the powers that be will give me permission, I'd like to set up such a spot.
Thanks Dafrieze,a download area is a good ides, one which had occurred to me over the last couple of hours, too. The way to do it is to copy what Albion has done, use UC as a common port of call and then link to the MediaFire (or other) download connections. I'll happily set up another category at UC (Downloads or whatever) and then maybe we could ensure than any future downloads are posted in threads there that are reserved for them? So any Straesser downloads, say, would be in a thread headed Straesser and so on. My one concern is that any files must be of music which is not available commercially, for obvious reasons. No CD rips, no files downloaded from commercial sites. Give me few days to mull this over, but I see no insuperable problems.
In the mean time, Khorovod, I have some recordings of music by Prinz Reuss and I'll upload that in the near future.
Sorry, Jerry, I should have thanked you for the Piano Concerto. Great stuff.
Thank you, that's brilliant! :)
Thanks everyone, I look forward to hearing this!
Thank you, Mark - that's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind!
And thank you, Jerfilm, for the Straesser piano concerto. (And conducted by Klaus Tennstedt, no less...)
re Straesser - not much information around about him I think, but there's some biographical information in a few places, including the link at the IMSLP category, which I'll reproduce- http://www.dohr.de/autor/straesser.htm (http://www.dohr.de/autor/straesser.htm)
There's also a link to the Straesser-Gesellschaft there, but I can't figure out how to get past its homepage.
He was apparently born in Burscheid, Germany in 1867; died 1933; was a conductor as well as composer, composed 6 symphonies or so (4 are, I think, still only in manuscript; the 6th and possibly also the 4th were, after his death was learned of, set to be premiered, the 6th conducted by Abendroth, though I don't actually know if those premieres happened. Found that much out from the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, some 1933 issues.
The first three symphonies - in G major, D minor, and A - minor or major?... - have been broadcast) ... -
anyhow, wrote a paragraph-long summary of what I knew of his output here (http://imslp.org/wiki/Category_talk:Straesser,_Ewald). There is a book, one copy of which is at the British Library (haven't seen it of course) and authored by his widow (pub. 1937), Ewald Straesser. Sein musikalisches Schaffen. with a list of works that's rather more definitive, I hope, if the piano concerto, and the 2 string quartets that Steve's Bedroom Band recorded over at IMSLP, create any interest in a composer whose name seems to have next to vanished (so far as I was concerned, certainly.)
Though I wonder - especially on the evidence too of his own clarinet quintet - if he was the clarinettist E. Straesser who is mentioned as having taken part in some performances Stateside in 1891?...
Eric
(late edit- RISM has information on symphony 4, which it gives opus 44, incipits of the 3 movements, etc.)
QuoteWhat I was clumsily trying to say, Jerfilm, is that there should be a centralized spot on this site where all the participants could upload otherwise unavailable recordings
Oh, my apologies, dafrieze, I completely misread your suggestion. Which was a great idea. My old brain just doesn't compute like it used to. Which is the only excuse I can think of.......
Jerry
really should see if I can find a copy of that worklist-book somewhere other than the British Library :) btw the 5th symphony is in G major and was premiered in or before 1923 (the conductor who premiered it, Karl Panzner, has a German Wikipedia article, in which the fact that he premiered it is mentioned. He died in 1923, which tends to imply the rest...)
Eric
QuoteThough I wonder - especially on the evidence too of his own clarinet quintet - if he was the clarinettist E. Straesser who is mentioned as having taken part in some performances Stateside in 1891?...
Seems to me that would be a huge coincidence. Betcha it is him.
Jerry
hrm. I'm no longer so sure- I think whoever this E. Straesser was (no first name given in full after all?) was first clarinettist of the Boston Symphony in the late 19th century or so. that information -may- be possible to work out. (then again, I was looking into someone who was one of the first conductors of a 2nd-or-so - but not third or fourth, I think...- tier American orchestra- and more info than that about him ? well, there were his (not Straesser, this was someone else.) compositions uploaded and scanned in to memory.loc.gov (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mussmhtml/mussmauthindex1.html)- but - that was it... one mention I think at the orchestra website, no... amazing I thought...erm. sorry. sorry.)
As an aside, an interesting anectodal description of Ewald Straesser can be found at:
http://books.google.com/books?id=64t28UCLJyMC&pg=PA68&lpg=PA68&dq=ewald+straesser&source=bl&ots=NA6YHShqKa&sig=EvxxT5NXtNCogP6qgk11jWIfYyw&hl=en&ei=Ck7yTcPIOoGTtwf6qcGSAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=ewald%20straesser&f=false
I enjoyed reading that. Thank you.
Have been spending my restful (and rest) day putting together a partial list of his works right now over at imslp (with as good sources as I can, of course). Interesting. I still haven't downloaded the piano concerto (whether or not complete or a 3-movement revision of a work originally in 4, or whathave)...
I wonder if the other orchestral works (non-concerto non-symphony that is - Fruhlingsbilder pub.1916 op.35, Tragödien-Ouv. op4 pub.1896) have been performed or even broadcast lately.
The Fruehlingsbilder were obviously broadcast recently, Eric, as they're amongst the off-air recordings I uploaded and are available in the companion board to this one.
whoops!!... ah. so op.1 is a concert overture, is it... *hastily fills in the gap in the IMSLP list whilst no one is looking... *
listening to sym. 1 now and if I may say- cpo or some similar company really should, in my honest opinion, grab at this and his others :). I enjoyed his quartets very much indeed but (and) this is really lovely (and imaginative)!!
Apparently Furtwangler conducted two Straesser symphonies in 1924 and 1927 (no.4 opus 46 and no.6 opus 50) according to the Tahra website, if there's no typos involved etc. (I thought sym6 wasn't premiered until 1933 or a bit later). No mention of any tapes surviving, though, I think :(
(ok, op46 is symphony no.4, from another document, not at tahra but at a furtwangler.net site.)
Someone may have conducted symphony no.4 opus 46 in E minor in Stuttgart ca.1921 (Zeitschrift für Musik 88Jg (1921 year), page 555. Either a review of a performance, or a note of a performance scheduled- if the latter, may not have happened; my notes taken down in the library ages ago (as detailed a bit boringly in another thread ;) ) don't seem to distinguish between the two; and I had never heard of Straesser when I wrote those notes (from which the ZM-related info is taken), was just writing down performance info about people I knew of- Raff, Draeseke- and didn't. May have some little use, but should have written more info than less. - 9-19 edit. (Never helped that I don't know much German, Gothic-lettered or otherwise- though when the subject is music I make do. Anyhow. Right.))
modified subject line belatedly in response to reasonable request :)
Just a quick 'thank you' for the STRÄßER uploads. What an enjoyable morning I've had - it's all so good. I can't understand why these aren't on LP - CD. The orchestral pieces are charming and the Piano Concerto is inventive and would surely have become a 'lollipop' - to borrow a term - had it been issued on CFP or, latterly, Naxos.
I speak entirely as a naive listener, and do wonder about their technical quality as compositions. Am I right in thinking that they are rather loosely structured works, and that the ideas tumble out rather than evolve? What's the general opinion of Sträßer among musicians?
Didn't know there was a general opinion of him (though I'm not a musician in the sense of playing an instrument, which I haven't done at all in years.) Never heard of him until last year, I think, when I saw the parts to one of his quartets uploaded to the digitization section at Sibley Library/University of Rochester. Never heard him until Steve's Bedroom Band performed that quartet (his 1st, of 1902 iirc) and his 4th (published 1920) which I think is still my favorite piece of his- and the overall structure of that one is bound together by recurring motifs (whether the individual movements themselves hang together- I'd still say yes, but could I prove it? Maybe.)
I'll have to give the PC another listen, but it did seem to me that, at first hearing, the work definitely had a sort of "stop and start" feel to it, as if there were spots where the seams showed.
JimL - that was just the kind of description that I would have used if I had the nous to think of it! :)