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Available From: Monday, October 10, 2005 |
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Stephan: Orchestral Works
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The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has an outstanding reputation for presenting twentieth century music and for re-discovering neglected composers, something wonderfully demonstrated by this new recording which is also the first by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra with its new Chief Conductor, Oleg Caetani. Caetani has enjoyed relationships with orchestras and opera companies around the world, having conducted the Dresden Staatskapelle, for example, for almost three decades. In September 2006 he will take up the position of Music Director of the English National Opera.
This marks the beginning of a new collaboration between Chandos and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and more recordings are planned.
Includes the premiere recording of Music for Orchestra (1910).
Issued as a surround-sound hybrid SA-CD.
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Born in 1887 in Worms, Rudi Stephan studied harmony and piano with Bernhard Sekles in Frankfurt and counterpoint with Rudolf Louis in Munich. He is also believed to have had some contact with Max Reger. Solitary and sensitive, he worked long and hard to develop a distinctive style. While his musical language is firmly grounded in the tradition of Liszt and Wagner and shows a composer fully aware of trends in the music of his time, Stephan was no dry formalist. His aesthetic seems related to that of the German art nouveau, or Jugendstil, which stressed organic form. Despite the intense labour that produced them, Stephan’s works give the impression of the unmediated unfolding of an emotional experience. He died on 29 September 1915 in the trenches of Galicia.
The (first) Music for Orchestra (1910) was premiered in Munich in January 1911 in the face of incomprehension and hostility from the orchestra. The single-movement piece grows organically out of a circling motion to and from particular musical events, and ends with a true coup de théâtre, Stephan adding the full force of an organ in a cataclysmic C minor.
His Music for Violin and Orchestra (1911) was criticised in the Berlin press as discordant and cerebral in 1913. However, its harmony is lush but diatonic and it explores a range of emotional landscapes as varied as those of Mahler. The orchestration has a sensuous beauty ranging from an opulent muscularity reminiscent of Strauss to a delicate Debussian transparency. Formally a rondo, it consists of four statements of the main thematic material separated by contrasting episodes. The (second) Music for Orchestra (1912) was performed at the 1912 and 1913 festivals of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, establishing Stephan as a significant composer of his generation and leading to a contract with the publisher Schott. The work’s slow introductory section has the kind of mysterious lushness explored by composers as seemingly different as Berg and Debussy. The final section is introduced by an energetic fugal exposition, and the work ends with a jubilant, almost Sibelian coda.
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Reviews
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'History is full of ‘what ifs…’ and they don’t come much more intriguing that the German composer Rudi Stephan, whose short life ended in 1915 in the trenches of Galicia. He was the most important composer to take up the baton from Reger and would have been a major figure in inter-war music. The three works here, brilliantly recorded, represent almost his total extant output. Well worth investigating.'
The Independent
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'Chandos has done lovers of 20th century German music a great service by issuing this program in performances and sound that are exemplary.'
American Record Guide
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