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I attended the West Mendip Orchestra's concert on Friday and the Volkmann symphony seemed to be well received by the audience. Members of the orchestra I spoke to enjoyed playing it. The conductor liked to choose unusual works and was aware of Christopher Fifield's book on the German symphony, so perhaps he'll come up with one of the other works reviewed on this forum. 

Volkmann's Symphony no. 1 is being played by the West Mendip Orchestra at Uphill, Weston-super-Mare, on Friday 22nd March. I'm in Exeter so could get there. No idea what the orchestra is like or how they came to choose this work. The similarity of the opening, which I've just listened to on YouTube, to the start of Borodin 2 has already been mentioned.

I was recently asked to play the piano part in the Coleridge-Taylor nonet with our informal chamber music club and managed to get my fingers round most of the notes! It's a remarkable work for a student piece, although clearly showing the influence of Brahms and Dvorak.

As a result, I bought the Chandos CD of chamber music performed by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective - this includes the piano quintet and piano trio as well as the nonet, all from Coleridge-Taylor's student years and probably not performed in public for more than a century. This ensemble has corrected numerous errors in the earlier performing editions, the manuscripts having remained in the RCM archive since the 1890s.

The Chandos recording of the nonet unfortunately suffers from a very prominent wind section, at the expense of the strings and piano which are on occasions difficult to hear clearly. The recording engineers must be at fault here - microphone placement? - although the balance is better in the two works without wind.

The finale of the quintet suddenly breaks into a fugue on an Irish sounding jig which seems a bit incongruous (although the subject is based on the trio from the scherzo) - but perhaps we shouldn't be too critical, considering the composer's youth....

Next up for me is the 1935 sextet for clarinet, horn, string trio and piano by Dohnányi.

I tuned into Radio 3 in the car this lunchtime (Georgia Mann's "Essential Classics"), in the middle of an orchestral piece, described on my screen just as "Prelude to Romeo and Juliet", which turned out to be by Raff. This programme has no detailed listing in Radio Times. I didn't make a note of the orchestra. Evidently this is one of the Four Shakespeare Preludes and I've just listened to it all on Youtube, played by the Jakarta Concert Orchestra. The producers of Radio 3 do therefore feature our unsung composers occasionally - does the BBC, or Classic FM for that matter, respond to requests from forum members?   

Two and a half years after the last contribution on this thread, I've just acquired the Arte Nova set of the Gernsheim symphonies from eBay for £6, so a bargain similar to Albion's purchase in 2011! I'd already listened to Symphony no. 1, which is discussed in Christopher Fifield's book, having never heard of Gernsheim before (I'm in my mid-70s).

These symphonies had an immediate appeal for me. There are many reminders of his friend Brahms, particularly the main theme of no. 2's finale, but also hints of Dvorak and other contemporaries. Gernsheim handles his thematic material well and writes especially well for the woodwind. He also includes instruments unusual in a German symphony - triangle and tambourine in no. 2 (tarantella) and harp in no.3. Nos. 2 to 4 last around 30 minutes each, so much shorter than the Brahms symphonies, but no. 1 runs to around 40 minutes and that's without the first movement repeat omitted by Köhler on the Arte Nova set; the scherzo is a more substantial movement that the equivalents in the other symphonies.

Although generally "conservative" in style and form, these works can be recommended to anyone wanting to hear a fresh voice from a period from which there is still so much music to be rediscovered. American music critic Dave Hurwitz has a ten-minute talk which can be found on line.

When it comes to public performances of the cello concertos, or indeed any concerto by one of the unsung composers we are discussing, we are faced with finding soloists who have them in their repertoire. An aspiring cellist would aim to learn some or all of the following - the Haydn concertos and those by Schumann, Saint-Saens, Dvorak, Elgar and Shostakovich, plus the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations and Brahms Double Concerto. That's already a large repertoire so Pfitzner unlikely.

Agreed! Draeseke, Grimm and Dietrich composed some of the most interesting, not to say important unknown symphonies of the nineteenth century.

Yes I agree too. Discovering them this  year has been quite a revelation (and I'm 76). I was just meaning that Pfitzner would be different!

I have a Hyperion CD of three Pfitzner cello concertos (two in A minor, one in G), and the duo for violin, cello and orchestra by the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin cond. S. Weigle. I must have bought it having heard one of the works on the radio so will listen to it again. It will make a change from Draeseke, Grimm and Dietrich!

Not many composers wrote string trios - Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Boccherini, Reger and probably others - they must be harder to play than quartets and require maximum projection of sound, even when playing piano.

This is quite an old thread and I've skim-read through it. I wanted to mention the role of amateur orchestras, of which there are many in the UK, in performing works by little-known composers. These orchestras are often of good quality and are only briefly mentioned in the posts above. I've experienced works by unsung composers played by several orchestras, either as a performer (timpani) or audience member.

Before I moved south I spent 17 years in a very good amateur orchestra in West Yorkshire. Early on in my stay there, we played Charles Ives 2nd symphony and much more recently symphonies by Amy Beach and Kalinnikov (no. 1) were featured. The programmes also included well-known works and there was no obvious fall-off in audience numbers. I was treasurer and member of the programme committee for most of this time so had some influence on programme planning. I remember that, in a few cases, difficulty in getting hold of parts, or the hire cost, was a factor in our decision making.

Other orchestras with which I was familiar played Berwald and Bruch symphonies (no. 3 in each case), the Dukas symphony, Bruch's concerto for clarinet and viola and Reger's Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart. (These examples are all from the last 20 years).

Of course amateur orchestras have lower costs than their professional counterparts (although many supplement their regular members with paid "extras") and, as has been mentioned above, friends and family of the players often add to the audience numbers and may be willing to sell tickets - so they  can afford to be less risk-averse with their programming.

Most of the concerts by the above orchestras featured works by more familiar, if not well-known, composers and there were the usual concerts of film music, Christmas and "family" concerts, as well as small groups of players fund-raising in a supermarket or garden centre!

I sometimes listen to Classic FM on the car radio and some years ago tuned in to an intriguing but unfamiliar piece which turned out to be a movement from the Dukas symphony. I believe they do requests from listeners so perhaps there is an opportunity here (although I'm not a fan of the Classic FM format). Regular listeners might get to hear something by chance which would not be their preferred choice.

I've been writing a post and, when trying to submit it, got a message saying I didn't have access. Presumably I exceeded the one hour login-in and was timed out. Is what I wrote saved somewhere?

As it happens I've just been listening to the Grimm and Dietrich symphonies. Both contain some fine music and seem to look forward to Brahms. The Dietrich though is let down by a rather weak finale but he was by no means the only composer to grapple with the "finale problem". Arriaga, Voříšek and Rott would no doubt have written more.

A few years ago I was in an orchestra which put on the Symphony by Paul Dukas. Written in 1896, part of the slow movement reminded me of Bruckner. I don't know how much of Bruckner's music would have been known in France at that time.

I have the Voříšek symphony coupled with the Arriaga by MacKerras - appropriate I suppose as these are two composers who promised much but died very young.

I've just listened to Scharwenka's fourth piano concerto, with the aid of the score on the TV screen (at least a piano reduction of the orchestra part, which is much easier to follow). I'd never previously heard any of his music and found this to be an attractive and very impressive work in four movements, lasting 43 minutes. I can imagine this would go down well at the Proms. The problem is, as has been suggested above, that there is an unlimited supply of music out there, including some masterpieces rarely or never performed, but the audience is finite and concert promoters would rather fill the hall with Tschaikovsky or Rachmaninov than have several hundred empty seats because punters don't want to risk Scharwenka (or Draeseke, Raff or Grimm or many others).