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Just recently one of my YouTube feeds came up with a piano concerto in B minor (1906) by Hermann Zilcher, a name entirely unknown to me. It sounded like it might be worth hearing, so I listened and was quite impressed. It has an intriguiging understated opening, and a rhapsodic slow movement that segues into the finale. (I think the same recording is in the archive here).

So I thought I should find out more about Zilcher, and found one reason for his neglect: he was one of those composers who joined the Nazi party in the 1930s, apparently of conviction rather than necessity.

I have always found it interesting that while the music found suitable by the Stalinists is relatively well-known today, that favoured by the Hitlerites is the blackest of black holes. Reasons are not hard to find, but nonetheless, one could argue that association with Nazism does not automatically mean that the music is no good musically.

It is not entirely clear to me how Soviet social realist music fits within the scope of UC (it certainly doesn't have much dissonance), but there is no doubting that composers like Zilcher, Trapp, Frommel, Schillings etc fall clearly into the late-romantic bracket, however much the composers themselves may be tainted as individuals. It could be argued that a revulsion for "Nazi music" was one of the motivations for the rejection of romanticism after WW2 (see Adorno, for instance).

So Zilcher is not much recorded, and I doubt if we will ever hear what his five symphonies are like. But it is interesting to note that all or virtually all of the Zilcher discography is available on Spotify, for those who have subscriptions. I would draw attention in particular to his piano trio, which is unusually in two movements, the second of which is a set of variations on what UK listeners will recognise as the Welsh tune "Ar hyd y nos".

... after Dvorak - where are they? Foerster with five, Ostrcil and Suk one each. Otherwise there is a bit of a gap until the 1940s, unless you consider Mahler a Czech composer. I feel there must be some neglected figure between Dvorak and Martinu, but I haven't found one. Suggestions?

Not really a new recording, but I notice that the performance by Robert Hosselet with the Belgium National Orchestra and Rene Defossez, which was in the archive here but I think got deleted, has been re-released by Naxos. At the moment, not as an actual CD. I was listening to it the other day; lovely late romantic concerto with a very distinctive opening.

To lighten your Monday, here is a little puzzle not unrelated to the topic of this site:

Musically speaking, which is the odd one out?

• London
• Oxford
• Cambridge
• Norwich

Answer at the weekend if no-one guesses, but I'm sure someone will work it out quickly.

I am wondering to what extent members of this forum have explored the music of contemporary composers in Japan, China and Taiwan, writing in a romantic style? And what your reactions are?

As a starting point, one could take the Taiwanese composer Tyzen Hsiao (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyzen_Hsiao), born 1938 and still going, though unwell. As an introduction, the violin concerto is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg7YqcCqCOs.

Just a note to mention that it is possible still to hear a real rarity, the Symphony in A minor by Sigurd Lie, on the BBC iPlayer. It was broadcast on "Through the Night" on 17 May. Note that depending on which version of iPlayer you use, it may not show up in the listing, but it begins 2h25m into the sequence.

Lie is a virtually unknown Norwegian composer who died of TB and wrote very little in his short life.

Note that this broadcast is of a commercial recording, available from the Norwegian company 2L.

Rather than drag a different thread off-topic, I will start a new one here.

There are a number of 20th C composers whose individual voice is so distinctive that if you heard by accident any ten seconds of music from an unfamiliar piece, you would still unfailingly identify the composer at once. Often because their way of constructing harmonies is unique.

It seems to me that it is much harder to spot 19th C romantics as quickly. So many wrote in a common idiom that is a mixture of Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms, and latterly Wagner and Strauss. So the subject of this thread is name the romantic composers (preferably less celebrated) whose style is so distinctive that you think they could be identified from any ten-second extract (within reason; not juvenilia, for instance).

The two that spring to my mind are Bruckner and Mahler. The difficulty with them is that they wrote so little that it might be hard to find an extract from an unfamilar piece. However, there was a time when I had not heard all the Mahler symphonies; and one day I heard a cousin of mine whistling something that I could correctly identify as Mahler, even with it being from a symphony I had not heard.

The two-piano concerto is evidently not a form used very much in the Romantic period - one imagines for the fairly obvious reason that the piano virtuoso of the period was not going to want to share the on-stage glory. Obvious examples are limited to Mendelssohn and Bruch. Then it is on to the 20th C.

Any obscure examples that can be pointed out?

Imagine the following: you have just turned on the radio and you hear the start of an unfamiliar orchestral work in an early romantic style. You missed the announcer (and we will assume you can't consult the programme schedule). A few minutes in and it is clear that this a first movement sonata allegro. Given the period, it could be a symphony (or even an overture), but then again, it could be a concerto, since most likely the soloist will not appear until the exposition repeat.

Question: is it possible to detect that it is the opening of a concerto before the soloist enters, just from the character of the music?

I sometimes feel that it is, though I couldn't give a technical explanation of how. Possibly in the case of a concerto the orchestral statement of the exposition will be less dramatic than would be the case in a symphony, since the fireworks await the soloist's entry. Possibly also one can intuitively feel that the material being introduced is pianistically conceived (in the case of a piano concerto), or would fit well with some other solo instrument.

Any thoughts?

I always find it remarkable that so many of the composers discussed on this site, no matter how obscure they might be, usually have some sort of presence on the Internet, usually as, at the minimum, a page on Wikipedia, howsoever short. However, digging around in the archive today I came across a symphony by Louis Thirion, who maybe deserves a prize for extreme least fame/most talent ratio.

I can find virtually nothing about Thirion beyond his dates (1879-1966) and that he was a pupil of Guy-Ropartz, and that his son (Louis-Claude) seems also to have pusued a musical career. The symphony is a wonderful piece of French late romanticism, recalling the composer's teacher to some degree. Well worth digging out of the archive for those who have not heard it.

Any other candidates for most interesting composer with least biographical info?

Suppose you find yourself in a shop and you spot a CD with an unfamiliar name on it. It's a composer you have never heard of. All you have to go on is a totally unfamilar name, the composer's dates (1851-1909, so romantic) and nationality, and a list of works on the CD. You have to make a snap decision whether to buy it or not. Googling is not possible.

What influences your decision?

A. You buy it automatically.
B. You buy it automatically if it's cheap.
C. You buy it depending on the composer's nationality.
D. You buy it depending on the genre (orchestral, chamber, choral, etc).
E. You buy it depending on the type of piece (e.g. you would buy a violin concerto but not a trumpet concerto).

... or some combination?

I'm interested to see what people's collecting priorities are in such a case.

One problem I have is that from time to time some tune comes into my head and sticks there, and I can't identify it. Now, if I listened mostly to standard repertoire, I could hum it to someone, and they could say, "Oh, that's the Silken Ladder overture". But I can usually be fairly sure it is by someone so obscure there is no chance that any friend of mine would even have heard of the composer, never mind be able to recognise the piece.

Here is a new game.

Imagine somehow you could take all the romantic piano concertos ever written, and somehow condense them into a single work that would be the expression of the dominant features of the lot of them. I call this the ur-concerto. It is the piano concerto that is most like every other romantic piano concerto. It has all the most commonly used gestures. So for instance, if the most common way to start the slow movement was a wistful theme introduced by the cellos, that's what the ur-concerto will have. And so on.

The question is, which actual piano concerto most resembles the ur-concerto? It will of necessity be by a minor composer, because it will be an assembly of every possible cliché in the repertoire. I have struggled with this for ages, but of course, the concertos that get recorded usually are those that have some originality!

Any suggestions for the most hackneyed romatic piano concerto?

I just got the new issue of the BBC Music Magazine; the cover CD features VW 6 and Bridge's The Sea. Now, Bridge may not be "unsung" these days, but when I was starting to discover music, he was just a footnote in Benjamin Britten's biography. And I have no doubt that for many who get the magazine, his music will be unfamiliar.

So here is a little fantasy. Just suppose you received an email from the editor of BBC Music Magazine along these lines:

"We are interested in the opportunity of alerting our readership to the pleasures that can be found in obscure repertoire, so we are scheduling an issue next year that will feature some completely unknown work on the cover CD. Given your expertise in this field, we would like you to choose it. Pick whichever one work you like, that you think will make the biggest impact on readers, and we'll arrange a good performance of it for the CD. Any space left over on the disc, we'll put in lollipops to sweeten the package for buyers off the newsagent shelf. This may be the only time we get to do this, so please choose carefully!"

What would you choose?

Whenever I try to post I get one of these captcha things and they are THE MOST unreadable ones I have ever seen. Do they ever go away? Even the audio version is hard to understand.