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Looks like you fixed it Eric, thank you, and thank you Ilja for posting it.

For most people, streaming IS how they listen to things.

Oh, I understand that, of course, and I have no problem with it. But if it's on YouTube it's not monetised as it would be on the commercial streaming platforms, so neither cpo nor the artists will get anything financially from it being streamed from there.

I'm gobsmacked that the whole double album, as yet unreleased, has already been posted of YouTube by the choir.

Good oh! To answer Justin's earlier query, this is definitely the Leipzig performance, recorded at the Gewandhaus on 6 June 2022.

My tolerance of heavy, extended chromaticism lessens by the day, so this is probably a recording I'll avoid. My loss, I'm sure.

Yes, me too. I add all newly acquired music to a playlist to ensure that it gets listened to in, roughly, the order in which I acquired it. Of course there are "can't wait" exceptions to that. As for Goetz, as I remember the piano music is like the rest of his output: often imbued with a delicacy which is still never slight or merely pretty and, when it's vigorous, it's never raucous.

Excellent! I'm fairly sure that it was recorded in Leipzig. With the upcoming release of Samson and the prospect of Die Eifersüchtigen in the autumn, it's going to quite a year for major vocal works by the master.

It's nice music, but an entirely unnecessary purchase. There's no great discovery here.

I wish I'd read that before I bought it, Alan!

Triodin's music in the excerpts is certainly attractive but also very much "out of time" for 1920s Soviet Union, so the opera's disappearance from the repertoire there is understandable.

It's a reference to this post of mine earlier in this thread

Now due out on 16 February.

It' been available as a download from Presto for a few weeks.

I understand that we can expect Raff's final opera Die Eifersüchtigen to be released on a major label later this year, probably sometime in the autumn. It's a live recording, taken from the 2022 Zurich performances, with some studio infill and I can vouch for its quality. More, as soon as I know it.

Extracts form the album can be heard here. Apart from the Lieder des Alters set, all of them could have been written pre-WWI.

[A further update]

A further update:

Now that Ilja has completed his promised visit to the Franke Foundation archive in Dresden, it's a good time to post an update on our investigations into the Franke fraud, as it has clarified a number of issues:

Firstly, it's clear that, despite our earlier suspicions and the lack of evidence for the pre-war biography quoted in reviews, articles and recordings, Hans Franke did actually exist and wasn't the creation of someone else. He was a jobbing musical administrator in Dresden and the surrounding Saxony area of Germany and it seems likely that he began his plagiarisms of 19th century compositions after suffering continued rejections of his own, poor quality, works. The "premieres" of those fraudulent works began in the war years as Franke no doubt took advantage of the Nazis' policy of removing Jewish and other "degenerate" music from the repertoire, thereby creating a gap which he could fill, although even then these performances were in secondary venues and given by spa or resort town orchestras. There is no evidence, despite his claims, that the Concertgebouw or Berlin Philharmonic ever played any of his symphonies. We are still investigating the role in all this of the Nazi music director of the Sudetenland, Bruno Schestak.

Secondly, there is no evidence for Franke's claim to have composed 800+ works and it's likely that the surviving 87 are his compete catalogue. Although he was living in Dresden at the time of the February 1945 fire storm air raids, his house was not in a part of the city which was bombed and it has survived, making it unlikely that the remaining works were destroyed.

The manuscripts of the 87 works are all impeccably written in the same unvarying hand and are largely free of corrections, implying that they were copied out over a comparatively short span of time - a decade perhaps, rather than over a composer's adult life.

Finally, we have now contacted both the publisher of Franke's compositions and the principal of the Archive with an outline of our discoveries in the hope that they will appreciate that getting to as near the truth as we can is in their interests and that they'll co-operate in our investigation as it continues.

Since the last update no new plagiarised works have been identified but UC members eschiss1 and Reverie have kindly agreed to join the investigation and their skills in identifying plagiarised scores and making digital reconstructions of samples of Franke's works will be great assets.

The thread is now unlocked but we ask members to restrict their posts to concrete evidence about Hans Franke's and Bruno Schestak's lives and identification of Franke's plagiarised compositions.