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Roberta was great - with a contagious sense of humour! Among other I had the pleasure of being involved in an unforgettable Ponnelle-Harnoncourt production of "Così fan tutte" (inculding Lucia Popp and Ann Murray) at the Zurich Opera long ago...

Alan, what about changing the title of this thread, eliminating "GUILD" and just mentioning "on CD", since Guild CDs are officially no more available, and the Brilliant Classics Box is still actual. So we could also consider new Brun CDs as:

https://prospero-classical.com/album/fritz-brun-early-chamber-music/

and:

https://vdegallo.com/en/produit/fritz-brun-violin-sonata-no-1-in-d-minor-violin-sonata-no-2-in-d-major-cello-sonata-in-f-minor-alessandro-fagiuoli-alessia-toffanin-andrea-musto/

Well, the "mature" Brun (if we consider this term chronologically) confirms to be a return to post-Romantic tonality...

As far as I can remember right now - without digging into my archive - Brun conducted also works by "unusual" composers like Braunfels, Nicodé, Vladigerov, Szymanowski and Delius.
Works by Reger, Kodaly, Strawinsky, Mahler and Hindemith were quite unusual for Berne between 1910 and 1940 too. I could even find a 1937 mentioning of Shostakowich's First Symphony, but not its confirming evening program leaflet.
Besides this, he premiered and conducted works by practically all his Swiss contemporaries, starting from Schoeck and Honegger.
But Brun's main repertoire involved the big "B"s (Bruckner included), Mozart - and Berlioz (one of his favorite composers). He would have loved a definitely more experimental repertoire, as I could learn from his letters.

Thanks, Alan! And, of course, there is the legitimate "de gustibus..." effect too :-)

I think so, Alan. But, as many other "tonal" composers of that time, Brun just liked to experiment with atonality. He even tried out, for example, to work with an extended theme made up of all 12 chromatic notes, but still sounding melodic within a cleverly constructed accompaniment.
He too he may have been concientious enough to think about who will have to listen to his music - as every "honest" (or, let's say "fair") composer should do :-)

Respighi, for example, comes up in some of his later works with very unusual harsh dissonances; but such "episodes" may still look as "homages" to his more "modern" colleagues. In "Feste Romane" he also homages Stravinsky's "Petrushka".

One must not forget that since the beginning of the 20t century, our musical ears have been "educated" considerably - allowing us to be able to hear more dissonances without always needing to stop them. It's mostly a question of goodwill and personal attitude towards the arts. This "educational development" also happened in the domain of pop music and jazz - thanks to many forward-thinking composers, who cleverly "experimented". The same happened to our eyes in the field of figurative arts. In my life I was able to approach more music lovers to modern/dissonant music than I ever thought. It depends how this "education" is done.

After David Hurwitz's thundering negative review on Brun - based on just one CD (definitely the wrong one) - I suggested him to listen to more music by this composer, but he refused. He had made his opinion without listening to Brun's lyric and differently constructed works - ignoring that composers can stylistically develop!

I too, I don't like picky categorisations of musical works. Especially considering that they came from earlier musicologists who had practically at their disosal only the big "Bs", Vivaldi, Mozart, Haydn and Wagner. Since a few decades, fortunately, an immense unknown/forgotten repertoire came to light.

As far as Brun's attitude towards atonality is concerned, just an example:
On his 5th Symphony - which he considered a "problematic one" since it not only required "intelligent Swiss audiences" but also "an intelligent conductor and many rehearsals" - he wrote:
I am faced with atonality like an enemy, should it end up as desolate paper music, but the knowledge that artists like Stravinsky and Schoeck are dealing with it captivates me greatly." (...)
"I felt the urge to consider chamber music-like writing. It was an elementary need. Intensive studies of Beethoven's late works lead me into it. At the same time I felt concerned with atonality."
This Symphony has a fabuolous, quite dissonant and tense Chaconne as a first movement. It stylistically deviates from the remaining movements, so he even allowed it to be played separately in concerts.

@Maury

Thanks for your comments. David Hurwitz's opinion of Brun's music was:
"Brun's spasmodic syntax must be as frustrating to the musician as to the listener. For penitential souls only."

Better orchestras are more expensive, but may not be interested in such repertoire (unless a big star promotes it), and even would play it reluctantly and, consequently, with inferior results...
Over here in Switzerland this project would have costed almost the double, and the players may have even not liked to play this difficult music. In Moscow and in Bratislava they liked it very much!

There are already various Schoeck song orchestrations on CD, as, for example, by Rolf Urs Ringger (1974/1977) and, just lately by Graziella Contratto. And I have done an arrangement of 9 songs from Schoeck's "Das stille Leuchten" for medium voices and wind quintet, which was performed in Zurich in 1919, at the occasion of Gottfried Keller's 200th birthday. I hoped for a larger ensemble, but the City of Zurich had not enough money for that... Dmitry Ashkenazy was the clarinetist. It was an open-air concert with other arrangements of mine, which was attended by over 1000 persons. It took place in the park near the Villa Wesendonck.

@ Maury
Try to find out my e-mail address from my Website, somewhere not quite openly, it is stated :-)

@ Maury
@ eschiss, please read my comments more exactly: I wrote that Symphonies 2-4 were printed by Hug, which means that they can be made available "for study" or "consultation" (by parcel post and agaimnst a fee, of course). This is a procedure of many publishers, unless they have agreed (for example with MPH-Repertoire Explorer) to have them reprinted (at MPH's expenses, naturally).This can be interpreted in different ways; but generally requested real "study" scores are being hired, not its PDFs. As far as autographs are concered, the Sacher Collection is even more intransigent than Hug. But Hug, for example, asked a very large hiring material sum for the instrumental parts I used for my recordings. And the Brun heirs and myself also encountered a various difficulties every time we wanted this or that Sacher scan (of the very autographs which were donated to them!). And, if we received some (in case of the Cello Sonata we had to wait for the scans over a half a year), large transparent "Sacher logo" watermark stamps were printed over the notes on every page, meaning that if something would be reproduced somewhere, their Sacher's lawyers may turn up with a penance.

The Sacher people got a real shock after having heard incidentally from me that, before handing over original MS's to Sacher, microfilms and photocopies were handed over by Bruns's son to a Berne Library and to the Zurich Central Library.
For my recordings I used the authograph photocopies of the Central Music Library - and this, luckily, before the Sacher people got shocked...

For editing the actual first printed scores of Bruns's Cello Sonata and of his 1st String Quartet, I had to sign a contract, obliging me to destroy the corresponding scans, once the printed scores would be published! This is absolutely grotesque!

We had various meetings in Basle, where the Brun heirs and the Central Library had to agree to various restrictions. But I was furious too, especially knowing that the Sacher Foundation will not do anything with Brun autographs anyway. The composer's son had handed them over to the Sacher Collection hoping that something would have been published! Sacher was a millionaire! His Archive is, in my opinion, but a "manuscript refrigerator". He had commissioned but one work to Brun (Symphonic Variations for piano and strings"), paying him a little fee of a couple of hundred Francs under condition that the authograph would become his propriety.

During is lifetime, Paul Sacher was a kind of Swiss music mafia boss he had become a much feared person, since he could destroy musical careers of players and critics with whom he had problems. After having performed in a concert, he would contact newspapers redactions to see if there would be a bad review or not, and forbiding it if there was a bad one. At he occasion his 80th birthday, a Siwss musicologist had written a very critical aticle on Sacher, exposing many of his "bad" sides. The article was censored. Apparently, his body-guard and chauffeur always carried a pistol with him. Before Hermann Scherchen was invited to Winterthur as a regular guest conductor, Sacher had written letters to composers an musicians, meaning that "we absolutely don't want this German guy over here" (Scherchen was not a Nazi, he just wanted to leave Germany). And, once everybody had opposed to his mobbing, Sacher continued harrassing Scherchen - even after he had left Winterthur for Lugano. Sacher was just jealous of such a much more better conductor than him.

If one wants to study Sacher autographs, he must travel to Basel and agree not to photocopy anything,  unless it's a famous composer like Stravinsky or Martinu or others, on which a monography ir an essay is being written, needing score pages or excerpts for musical examples.

I could let you have without problems those 3 Hug Symphony PDFs (which I had personally scanned for them before its paper would crumble to dust, due to unprofessional storing or because they were manufactured with cheap paper), but I am sure that after this, those PDFs would appear in short time on ISLMP, with which the publisher and the Brun estate may not agree yet and involve myself into the affair since it is known that I had scanned them. But, in the case of these three scores, "printing copyrights" will expire soon anyway. There are different laws on this subject in different countries, meaning that I may be flexible in supplying :-)
In any case, Brun becomes performing copyright-free in 2029, making things by then much easier.

@ eschiss
Yes, eschiss, but my new link is to a slighly revised version of the "booklet" :-)
I annouced the puslishing of the Brun Cello Sonata in my earlier posting already .

@Maury
Thanks for your compliments!
To be "simple" (but sorry if I just write this down in a hurry):
Brun started à la Brahms - and very sporadically, sometimes even with a smile, he later rarely on comes back to him. In his 2nd Symphony he consciously homages his friend Othmar Schoeck's "song-like" lyricism - and their common love for Romaticism (its Scherzo is not at all my faourite, but how wonderful is the slow movement and what a humourous finale!). In his 3rd Symphony he exeriments with extreme chromaticism and daring counterpoint - except in the slow mouvement, which forebodes alreay his later, more "modern" style - and how he can still write great lyrical music with dissonances. But its last movement is romantic again, perhaps not a a really good piece. In his 4th, in a way he justifies his good-bye to Bruckner (and faithfulness to Brahms), but at the beginning of its last movement he even tries to write aleatorically. In his 5th he uses Baroque forms with dissonaces, but also homages Berlioz (one of his favourite composers). And so he goes on, and he never wanted to repeat himself! In this 9th, he creates a sort of "Sinfonia Domestica" (but a less painfully inflated one than Strauss's) - and in his 10th I feel a homage to Robert Schumann! His most perfect Symphony may be his 8th. (I adore it), but in there he also has daring - and long - row-motivs containing all 12 notes! Its slow movement (perhaps a bit too long), is a set of variations (like the slow movement of the 3rd.) and its scherzo is a tricky "serenade" for bass-clarinet solo and a transparent nocturnal orchestra. The 6th and 7th use also Baroque forms with daring dissonaces and homages to Schoeck and to Berlioz.
But all this is pure and honest Brun. An unprepared listener needs patience to get into this rather complex world.
Do also listen to his early, fascinating and deeply humanly felt tone poem "Aus dem Buch Hiob".
And his later great "Symphonischer Prolog" should also be performed and appreciated: it's a very difficult, but imprtessive piece, in which the composer let us feel his believe in life and happiness that World War II was just reaching its end!
And what about his concertante works? Just listen to the (very originally scored) slow movements of his Piano and Cello Concerto!
Or that short, very daring (and difficult) "Verheissung" for chorus and large orchestra!
Last but not least: Brun's music is not a typically "conductor-composer's" music, but a "composer-conductor's" one. Similarly to Furtwängler, composing would have been his main goal. But as a young man already, a good conducting post was offerd to him, so he worked 38 years as a "subscription concert" maestro with  a main repertoire concentrating to Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruckner. At the same time he had to lead two chrouses, allowing him to perfom the greatest masses and oratorios of music history from Bach to Honegger.
Brun was also a frequent - and much appreciated pianist in chamber concerts and song recitals! Like Ansermet, had his orchestra under total control - guest conductors were very seldomly invited. Brun even had not time to be invited to conduct other orchestra. Occasional guest appearences were in Zurich and in Geneva. Following rare "foreign" apperances as for the (Italian first!) performance of Bach's Mass in B Minor, sigle Festival concerts in Leipzig, Paris and Vienna, Brun did not reach an European renown - simply because he was not at all interested.
After he had decided to retire, the orchestra management started to realise that his successor would never be able to cope with such enormous duites as a conductor, chorus leader and chamber musician.
This large working schedule gave him little time spend in creating music. And familiar duties were also there to accomplish

Hi eschiss :-)
Thanks for your interest.
Try to find a way to send me your e-mail address ( or to find out mine) and I will be happy to send you more infos and PDFs of the Brun scores which I have edited.
As far as Brun's orchestral scores are concerned, except Symphonies 2, 3 and 4 (which were published by Hug & Co.), they never have been printed, they exists in MS form only. The problem is, that these MS are (unfortunately!) owned by the Paul Sacher Foundation, so even my hands are bound.

By the way, the score of Brun's Cello Sonata has just been released (for the first time) by Musikproduktion Höflich, and Brun's First String Quartet is in the cannel for 2025.
https://repertoire-explorer.musikmph.de/de/produkt/brun-fritz/

I've also realised a 3 1/2 hour's Fritz Brun documentary film, with 1 1/2 hours bonus tracks, including a few studio session sequences. The film is in German, and not commercially available, but I can send you its link too. It's in 27 chapters, with many musical examples and documents, easily consultable. I've often "visualizied" the musical examples with graphic interpretations of existing art pictures, or with Swiss landscape sequences.
It would be a total financial flop to have this 5-DVD-box published commercially! Swiss and German TV stations (and arte) were not even interested in a 55-minute's version of this documentary; they found that Brun had not been known enough outside Switzerland - a thing which today one can be discussed about...

And here is a link to my (too voluminous for a CD box) booklet of my "complete" Brun recordings on Brilliant Records
https://www.mediafire.com/file/rf7q4zb8sqeh80z/FRITZ_BRUN_-_Booklet_Brilliant_Classics_95784.pdf/file

@Maury: Why ist it always necessary to define and classify (music) styles? But sometimes this can help music lovers to be better introduced to less-known pieces.

 

My personal opinion: This is a rather endlessly boring piece, where Raff definitely failed as a music dramatist - and librettist.
This time he had no sense at all for comedy in music.
In German we call this kind of music "betulich" - which can be mildly translated into "comfortable", but I felt rather unconfortable. Already the extremely long first act never seemed to come to an end and no surprises occurred later on.
But with a lot of patience one can still enjoy Raff's skills as a melodist and an orchestrator.
Again, I shake my head on that this ensemble proudly calls itself "Orchestra of Europe".
(I've already posted a similar criticism in this forum, at the occasion of the Zurich production, which I attended).

This has just been released in Switzerland. A super and luxuriantly presented production.
It includes also a libretto with French and English translations!

Scherber's First Symphony is definitely a Bruckner homage :-)