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I'm baffled by this piece. So far as I can recall, I have never heard of Vladimir Sokalsky, yet this symphony is extremely familiar. It's not just that it reminds me of another work, I can hum along with it (except the finale). It's as though the orchestra has recorded another work by mistake, but I can't think what. Or is there another work that uses the same themes?

Reading this thread, I thought I must get the set of the orchestral music; then I thought, "Surely I have it already?". A quick search of the shelves and there it was, unplayed for a long while. So having listened now to the first symphony, I am inclined to agree with the praise bestowed on it by the other posters here.

As to the opening, there is no question in my mind but that Borodin lifted it. How interesting! You never see mention of it in notes on Borodin's 2nd, nor is it pointed out in the notes on the Volkmann.

The influence on Tchaikovsky is also clear. The slow movement sometimes sounds as if it is going to wander off into the Pathetique.

The trouble is that what is "MUST HEAR" to one person is not necessarily the same to all.

The OP mentions the Strauss early symphonies (the first written at the age of 16) but they don't appear in the list. I have a very strange LP of the D minor symphony. It is not the usual black plastic, but turquoise and translucent!

I have been listening to some of Volkmann's piano music and piano duets. They are effectively salon music, but if you like salon music (as I do) they are very good, and I expect, very commercial in their day.

Clearly both Soviet and Nazi composers had political pressures to write in a conservative style. The main difference, perhaps, is that in Germany, composers who wanted more freedom of expression, and did not want to write only in a conservative/romantic idiom, generally emigrated in the course of the 1930s. Composers in the USSR did not have that option, so they were forced to toe the artistic line whether they liked it or not.

They are not as neglected as 1-4. Numbers 2 and 3 are possibly my favorites of the whole set!

It depends what you mean by "get" - understand or like? I don't like most romantic opera much, but I have no trouble understanding it. Verdi is not a draw for me, great composer though he may be.

For my own part, association with the Nazis, the Soviets or any other political ideology is no bar to discussion of a composer's music here. It is an irrelevance. The music's the thing.

I rather assumed that would be the case. I think it is the most sensible attitude.

I agree entirely. There is a Hermann Zilcher website here: http://www.hermann-zilcher.de/home.htm. Only in German, I'm afraid, but useful nonetheless. (I like the PC very much, by the way.)

Interesting! So there is a Zilcher Society in Germany. The web site has a link to a very ancient recording of the composer conducting the first movement of his 4th symphony. It also appears that the 5th symphony has been recorded on CD, but the CD seems not to be available any longer on the Tonkünstlerverband Bayern website.

we used to have uploads of a few works by Zilcher btw (including his 2nd violin concerto, but the link no longer goes anywhere) and an earlier discussion of his music here.

I just re-uploaded the recording (see DOWNLOADS) :
Herman Zilcher (1881-1948) : Violin Concerto No. 2 in A major, op. 92 (1942)
Violinist : Michele Auclair
Rhineland Pfaz.Ph.
Conductor : Christopher Stepp

Thanks for that!

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".

Although I entirely appreciate the need to tune an instrument on stage, I must say that I know where the author is coming from in regards to warming upon stage. Over the last few years I've been to several concerts in the US given by the Boston Symphony, Philadelphia and Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestras, and in each case musicians begin to filter on to the stage fully 20 minutes before the concert begins and then warm up incessantly for the whole remaining time, often treating us to snatches from the works which will be played later in the evening. It isn't tuning up, it isn't even warming up, it's practising! At one concert a couple of years ago, I heard the thrilling horn motif from Strauss' Don Juan six times during this pre-concert cacophony, which wholly ruined its impact when the piece was actually performed.

This seems to be a peculiarly American phenomenon, as the concerts of British, German and Swiss orchestras which I've attended over the same period see the musicians enter usually about five minutes beforehand, tune up briefly and the direction of the leader, and then await the conductor's arrival.

The Scottish National Orchestra used to do this a lot in the days when I attended regularly, before it became the RSNO. I used to find it rather interesting to play identify-the-phrase. Typically, one player would suggest a phrase from some work, and another would respond with something from the same work, or a related one, and so on. I never found it annoying.

I'm also reminded of the story of someone years ago who took an Arabian friend to a western concert for the first time. After it was over, he asked which piece the visitor had enjoyed the most.

"The first of the four," was the reply.

"But there were only three pieces!"

Then he worked out that the tuning up had been mistaken for a performance.

True - but there are degrees of "unsungitude". "Totally unfamiliar to the average listener" is different from "never having been recorded", but they are on the same scale.

One could almost say the majority of works by well-known composers are unplayed. When did you last hear any of Dvorak's first six symphonies programmed, for instance? Or any of Haydn's piano concertos?

Perhaps this is why I've gotten little out of him. My recording of the D symphony is Walter and the Slovak state

It's not just the playing and the recording; Barenboim knows how to interpret this sort of music and Walter doesn't.

I have started reading this, and considering that it is a PhD thesis submitted to a German university, it is very readable. I can recommend it to all regulars here. He makes some very interesting points; I will mention one: for composers born before 1850, if you took a poll of ordinary concert-goers as to which were the most important, and then repeated the exercise with academics in university music departments, the results would tally almost entirely. For composers born after 1850 they would have almost nothing in common.