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Several years ago, someone from Nederland used to send me a few recordings he'd make of Classical and early Romantic works performed live and broadcast on some radio station, works that - to both our knowledge - had never been commercially recorded before.  Among these was the Piano Concerto #2 in C, Op.50 by Conradin Kreutzer.  Unfortunately, my Dutch acquaintance didn't start recording until partway into the first movement, but still, what he captured is riddled with operatic, singable tunes, and sounds really nice.  It has a few surprises, like an instant tempo change here and there, introduction of a fresh lyrical theme virtually out of the blue, just enough to keep the listener on his toes, but there's nothing really innovative or amazing about it.  It's just a very solid, very nice, early Romantic piano concerto.

My problem is, I can't find any information whatsoever about orchestral works of C.Kreutzer, other than a work for Bassoon and Orchestra (which I find to be terrific).  Other than this, I've never seen more than that he wrote "piano concertos".  Not how many, when, or anything, just that he wrote "some".  Digging a bit, I found a single reference to a non-opera concert overture and an orchestral "dance", both dating from 1834; something I just discovered for the first time today!  There just seems to be a strange lack of information about the works of Kreutzer, other than a couple of his operas and chamber works (and that Fantasie for Bassoon and Orchestra).

Has anyone else had occasion to hear anything else of Conradin Kreutzer going out over the radio, or in a concert?  Obviously, at least his 2nd Piano Concerto is around, and printed, and has been performed in modern times.

Thanks a bunch for this notice!  I've already had the Romantic Piano Concerto #54 on my to-buy list, and it'll be great to verify for sure whether or not this is something I want to do.  I'm always very, very nervous when buying music composed after 1880 in the dark.  Luckily, when I obtained Somervell's Violin Concerto (because I wanted Coleridge-Taylor's, on the same disc), it showed me that there may be more to explore there, and I've been waiting to give him a second go.  I've started recommending Somervell's VC to people I know who, like me, shy away from orchestral music of that time period, and I really hope the PC (from about a decade earlier) is in the same vein.

I do know that the sound-clips on Hyperion's site excited me already; I just heard them for the first time yesterday, and I just can't resist those tunes!  If the whole work is like the openings of the movements, then it'll be a great discovery indeed!

The Pacini was obviously by far the weaker (and also much the less ambitious, lasting about less than half an hour).

I am in absolute opposite to this, as I don't like Liszt's Dante symphony, while I like Pacini's quite a bit.  I always wished that more of those early/mid-19th century Italian composers had written operatic-style symphonies.  Do you know what I mean by that?  I just don't know of many at all.  Imagine Rossini in the 1840s or 1850s composing a four-movement symphony for full orchestra, operatic in tone... I'm sure he had come up with a nice tune or two after his virtual retirement that never got put onto paper!

I'm fascinated by the idea of an "Italian Opera-style Symphony", and thus far, Pacini's Sinfonia Dante is the only one I can think of.  I'm not saying simply symphonies by Italian composers, mind you; there are quite a few of those that I know and love.  I mean, specifically, symphonies that have a texture/feel taken completely from the style and sound of Romantic-era Italian operas.

That looks pretty interesting.  Unsung Norwegian composers from before 1900 tend to be hard to come by in recording.

By the way, I do question whether living from 1755 - 1836 (Israel Gottlieb Wernicke) would place one in the Baroque period. I also don't imagine many people would consider a composer who lived from 1741 to 1807 to be a Baroque composer.  Not really important, but it does seem a tad odd.  The musical eras may be seen differently in Norway, I suppose.  Mostly, I get the impression the Baroque era is seen to have ended by 1750.  I don't recall ever seeing Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) classified as Baroque, for instance.

[Note:]

Note: the below is all just my pure, uneducated opinion. I don't mean to bother anyone; let me know if any of it does, and I will consider rewording it. I don't like mentioning negative opinions in writing, since it seems more harsh in print, but a few pop up here.


While Chadwick's Symphony #2 has become one of my favourite symphonies - and symphonies are my second-favourite musical form after operas - I too must claim Foote as my favourite overall of that company.  If there is a Foote work I consider the worst I've heard, I still find it at the very least mildly pleasing; for me to find that from a composer outside the Classical period makes him nearly unique.  Foote is one of those composers that I can't believe isn't more famous.  In fact, if I were to try to force myself to name five composers that I thought could be more popular regardless of my own personal taste, I think would name Foote to such a list.  That may sound like too much praise, but I'm completely enraptured.  While there are some chamber works among my most adored pieces, that tends to be the exception... so coming from me, this shows just how incredible I consider Foote to be.  I think I might call Foote the greatest composer ever from the USA; I think I might call him the greatest composer born in either of the Americas.  Maybe that's unfair considering how relatively little there is to hear thus far.  For that matter, I don't think he was all that prolific.  But then, relatively speaking, neither was Chopin.  In my defence, I believe I have every single work of Foote's that has ever been commercially recorded.  To say that I have never been disappointed is a severe understatement.

But I've found at least one nice work by 5 members of the Boston Six, the odd man out being Amy Beach. (Something seems technically incorrect about that sentence, but as I pointed out recently, I'm not a very skilled writer.)  I'm open to further exploration, but what pass for the famous works of Beach do not appeal to me at all - yes, including the Gaelic Symphony.  Large passages are overtly repellent to me, unfortunately.

If you haven't heard Paine's Symphony #1, you're really missing out; it puts a very fine face on musically looking backwards more than forwards.  I've always been a big fan of ladder-climbers, not just ladder-builders.  Actually, I think I usually prefer the non-innovators in music!  The vast majority of Paine's 1st (1872-1875) seems like it could have been composed 30 years earlier, but this is musical conservatism in the hands of a skilled technician who unashamedly dug in to an earlier decade with some really terrific tunesmithing.  Give that first movement a listen if you haven't already, and if you like mid-19th century symphonies, I think you'll be very happy!  This one was a real surprise for me.  His 2nd sounds more in with the times, but for some reason, just doesn't do it for me.  Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's terrible or anything, but as I pointed out on this message board once before, I think maybe he was trying too hard to make a symphony that sounded more like what big European composers of the time were doing.  Maybe he was born in the wrong decade in some ways, but with his first symphony he seemed to accept it, and I think it worked brilliantly.  The 2nd has some passages that just seem dull and rambling to me, but it has a few minutes here and there that are okay.

I mentioned Chadwick's Symphony #2 above, and it's one of my most-frequently visited symphonic companions.  My preferred disc is from Chandos, with Neeme Järvi conducting the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, where it's paired with the 3rd.  Chadwick's 3rd is also a really, really good symphony as far as I'm concerned.  I was so swept away by this CD that I went on something of a spending splurge, and bought quite a few works by Chadwick without having any idea what I was getting into.  This was a happy accident.  He even wrote a piece in honour of another of the subjects of this thread, Elegy, in memoriam Horatio Parker.  If you're in a somber mood, I think this might catch you really perfectly.  Some of the orchestration sounds like a precursor to film music at times.

MacDowell wrote some really nice stuff.  Didn't he study under Raff briefly?  I may be in the minority for preferring his 1st Piano Concerto to his second, but I really like both.   I don't think his Piano Sonata #2 (Eroica) is very well-known, but I think it would surprise quite a few open-minded folks if they gave it a listen.

[loathe]

I don't know whether or not Poulenc would fall into the purview of this board... I don't think he's "unsung", and I don't think he's even "Romantic".  But he's probably the most modern-sounding composer to write a piece that I didn't outright loathe (unless you want to count film or video game music, which tends to harmonically sound more Romantic than 20th century).  His Concerto for Two Pianos is one of the few pieces of non-vocal music to make me laugh out loud!  I wasn't laughing at the piece because I thought it was bad, it just drew laughter out of me.  I first heard it probably 12 years or so ago; I had never read/heard any description of it, it was just someone recommending a piece of 20th century music I might not hate, but without any information to go along with it.  I agreed to buy a CD with it and listen to it totally blind, as it were.  And I thought it was hilarious, especially the first movement.  It sounded like a way to mock Vivaldi without really mocking Vivaldi, and more than that.  I can't remember all my first impressions.  True, the work contains passages that reach the point of nearly physically nauseating me due to certain sounds and/or note sequences that I find unbearable, but I actually like the piece overall.  I didn't know his music was meant to be humorous, I didn't know anything whatsoever at the time; the fact that I was laughing, and later found that I was supposed to find it amusing, to me shows that Poulenc had some real skill.  I may hate 95% of all the measures of music I've ever heard by him, but I just have to say he had real skill to pull that off.  I find most of Berlioz's music harsh and unpleasant, so you can imagine what many 20th-century sounds do to my poor 18th century ears!

Also on that CD was a Sextet (?), with flute and piano and other instruments, I think. My CDs are still in cardboard boxes since a tree fell on my house, and I haven't gotten them back out even though I've been back in the house for almost 13 months!  That had a pleasant tune or two in it, as I recall.  It did lots of 20th-century stuff that I just can't tolerate - I'm not exaggerating when I say sometimes a lot of music after 1830 or so makes me physically nauseous.  But at the same time, once again, to this day I hold the impression of real talent, refined with serious training and skill.


EDIT: I apologise again for the poor writing.  I'm one of those people who has very good spelling, but horrible writing skills.  I never use any kind of spellchecker, so you'll see any of my spelling errors when I brazenly leave them for all to see.  But this post is poorly written even by my abysmal standards.  I'm just too lazy and stupid to correct it tonight, and it's difficult for me to put into words the combination of positive and negative feelings Poulenc's music leaves on me.  I try never to talk about the negative on this message board, since it doesn't really do anything good for anyone (including myself).  I'm just talking about my negative reactions to certain music here to give an indication how impressive Poulenc is to leave someone like me - someone totally grounded in the "Classical Period" - anything even resembling a positive impression.

Composers being born after 1750 precludes the inclusion (haha!) of Gossec, but J.P.E Hartmann was born between the years 1750 and 1899.  He died literally weeks shy of his 95th birthday (1805-1900).  Surely, in any study of longevity of composers born on those years, he must stand out as an exceptional case.  Not to mention, he was a pretty fine composer!  The finale of his Symphony #1 (of 2?) contains an exciting climax that worms its way back into my memory, and I listen to it frequently.  I may be alone in this peculiarity, but the guy really did know his stuff... and let's be honest, he had plenty of time to perfect his craft!

As someone who lists "longevity" as one of his absolute top fascinations, I'm very interested in this topic.  I'm somewhat obsessed with supercentenarions, and Jeanne Calment - holder of the longest confirmed lifespan in Human history - is my idol.  It's one of my top topics of conversation in daily life, actually.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Peter_Emilius_Hartmann
I point out J.P.E. Hartmann because he's not well-known to most. If you already have him on your radar, I apologise.

I just sent in for a copy of the book today, and I can't wait for it to get here.  This is just so absolutely fantastic.  This is about as thrilling for me as finally getting to read Dittersdorf's autobiography in English; I'd been pining for that for about a decade, but I'm about equally excited by this one.

Just on a whim, I looked up two Wikipedia articles this morning: 1877 in music and 1937 in music.  1937 was the year before this book was initially released, right?  1877 is fifty years prior, when Helene Raff was about 12 years old or so.  I'm sure she had clean memories of the music world from that time, with a better awareness than the vast majority of European residents could have had... for obvious reasons.  Her father's Violin Concerto #2 was completed that year.  In 1937, prior to this book's publication, Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta débuted.  That's quite a change!  We go from 1877 with Sullivan's The Sorcerer, to 1937 and Berg's Lulu.  1877 witnessed the birth of Ernő Dohnányi, while in 1937 Phillip Glass entered the world.

I don't know why, but I find this pretty fascinating.  Makes me really wish that Gossec or J.P.E. Hartmann had written about that, how different things were in music from their youth to their later years.

"mythological figures"
"Nothing 'supernatural' about it"

I'm so confused.  I thought I remembered it being about gods and stuff.  That's about as supernatural as it can possibly be.  So I can't understand how that would be a mark against Stanford.  What would be in his opera that's more supernatural than a pantheon of deities??!

R. Wagner's Ring cycle has a completely supernatural plot and gets produced all the time.

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Pacini the awesome opera composer? He died in 1867, and I don't know if he played the violin, but was it in honour of him? Or another Pacini? If it was in honour of the opera composer, I'd absolutely love to hear it, especially if it was some kind of stylistic-homage piece. A lot of people ridicule and hate that kind of thing, but if done well, it can be really fantastic. I'm pretty into Pacini's music, actually. I've got six of his complete operas, and a very generous someone helped me finally - literally after years of dreaming of it and thinking it was an unperformed/unrecorded work - get to listen to a performance of his Sinfonia Dante. That old Italian had a real knack for the dramatic. If Stanford was like many musicians of the 19th century, he might very well have liked Pacini.

There's a local radio station that's been giving Stanford some loving over the past year, much to my delight. In fact, just TODAY they played his entire 3rd Symphony! http://www.wvtf.org is the station, if you're interested. It's based in Virginia, in the USA. Just a couple of months ago, they put on his Concert Variations on an English Theme. The sheer quantity of music that I listen to has one drawback... it was during work, and I sometimes have to drive to schools, and I have this station on the radio the whole time that I'm driving. I'm hearing the last 3 minutes or so of this work after I start the vehicle, thinking how exciting it is, and how it sounds vaguely familiar. I make a special internal vow before it finishes that I'll memorise the composer and work to seek it out later. Then the announcer gives the title and composer and yep, I have it in my collection, and yep... heard it more than once! It's a long, convoluted story, but if not for this radio station, I'd probably never have heard of Charles Stanford (or Raff, for that matter).

Wow, has this gotten rambly.  I just wanted to say, this radio station also put on Stanford's entire 5th symphony just a couple of months ago as well. It's quite rare that radio stations in the US will put on non-famous works of that length on in their entirety. At least one of his Irish Rhapsodies, a few chamber works, the Op.32 Suite for Violin and Orchestra, and probably a few other things have gotten airtime in the rural backwoods mountains of Virginia in the US-of-A. The 5th Symphony was aired with complimentary words by the announcer as well, if my memory's right.

Stanford is one that appeals to me quite a bit, and more over time. He wrote works that sound backwards-looking in a lot of ways. Coming from me, that's a huge compliment. His Symphony #7 came out in 1911. To avoid bothering anyone, I won't mention anything specific, but there was a lot of music written in and about 1911 (some of it quite famous) that makes me feel physically nauseated after a single minute. Stanford's Symphony #7 is far, far from that company in my book!

I love composers who feel that their position coming after a musical period gives them a vantage to try to use their future knowledge to write more in that period's style, rather than feeling that they have to rush away from it as fast as possible. A lot of composers (Pergolesi, Berlioz, Schönberg?) see a ladder and don't want to climb it, they just want to add new rungs on top. Other composers see a ladder built by others (Moscheles, Czerny, Foote?) and think that they can do plenty well without trying to extend it. After all, eventually it gets too tall (I'll avoid naming names) and just becomes unsafe, falls over, and it's just a complete wreck. In different cases, to my own particular taste, I do not see either ladder-builders or ladder-climbers as being superior or inferior to the other. I realise that most music scholars - practically all of them - consider only ladder-builders (or those they believe were ladder-builders) as being worthy of true consideration, but I've heard too much amazing music by composers I consider to be not-too-original. Ferdinand Ries is amazing in my book, and I agree completely with those who say he wasn't all that original. So what? Stanford doesn't sound to my untrained ears to be particularly of his time, especially in the 1910s. That's fine. Give me his 1910s music over most everything else that was composed in that time!

... wow, this may very well be the most poorly-written message ever posted to this forum. I'm too lazy and tired to clean it up right now, but I'll delete it if anyone finds it incomprehensible.

Summary? me like stanford. stanford maked good musics.

The second theme from the first movement of Joseph White's Violin Concerto in F-sharp minor.  I can't believe this work isn't more famous; it's perhaps my favourite violin concerto of all time.  When the full orchestra gives it full blast at the end of the movement, it's just one of the most sublime things I've ever heard.  I can't recommend it enough.

As a huge fan of The Big Tune, I know this discussion will probably end up costing me some money. Actually, I think I already see some of it heading toward the Tiroler Landesmuseen once again (and it's always money well-spent, no doubt about it).

I love reading about people's experiences with this sort of thing.  Having my opinion of a work grow on me to the point of becoming a really passionate enthusiasm over time... it's fairly rare, but truly delightful.  It's a different sort of thing than a love-at-first-hear deal, it feels different, but it's no less satisfying to me.

In my case, there are several such works, including the famous Rachmaninov Piano Concerto #2, and the not-so-famous Stanford PC #1.  Then, there are whole composers - largely speaking - that have grown on me in this way.  Perhaps the most surprising of these is Reinecke, of all people.  For some reason, my taste for Reinecke grew from initial indifference, slowly over time, until now the lukewarm has turned into a blaze.  Reinecke's music really appeals to me in a huge way these days.

But more than that, most of all, it was Joachim Raff.  Before Raff, there was little written beyond 1830 or so that I liked at all.  Even a lot of Mendelssohn - generally regarded as fairly tame - struck my ears as unnaturally harsh and unpleasant.  My ears were just completely attuned to the late 18th century, and moving outside that was sometimes almost physically unpleasant.  I liked Czerny, Moscheles, Sullivan, and other composers that might be described as backward-looking in terms of their harmonic tendencies; Classical-Romantics, I once heard them called.  There were just certain sounds and audio-textures that started being used as the 19th century wore on that I just couldn't tolerate.

Some clarinetist from Australia communicated with me via e-mail, perhaps because of an article I'd written on Franz Krommer, I can't recall why.  In any case, he told me about a composer whose name I had only vaguely seen a few times.  I don't think I'd ever heard a note of this Joachim Raff before he convinced me to check out the 5th Symphony.  Those opening seconds just wowed me instantly.  I got a few CDs, gave them a listen, and thought it was okay, but not my cup of tea.  Time went on, and I'd listen again for some reason, and again... and each time, I liked more.  I got more CDs, thought to at least get the complete symphonies... and I eventually came to like, then adore, all of them.  Every single one.  Not sure which is my least favourite (#6?), but I actually love it.  Then I started finding the chamber music, cello concerti, piano concerto, an amazing CD of songs, everything... and now, I'm just blown away.  I don't get into lists much, but if pressed, I'd name Raff as one of the top 5, or even top 3, composers who ever lived, and I do mean of all time.

Sorry about the length of this.  I know it's just words, but this growing adoration thing is a really outstanding adventure, and I'm really excited in the hopes of going through another one soon, whether it be for a single work or a composer in general.

Try this:
http://www.rapidshare.com/files/294183474/K__nneke.zip

Järvi did Chadwick's symphonies 2 & 3 for Chandos, and as far as I'm concerned, that was a serious winner of a disc.  If you use that as an indicator of what might be coming with the Raff recordings, there may be serious cause to be optimistic here!