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ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK: Der Blaue Vogel

Incidental Music after a Christmas Fairy Tale by Maurice Maeterlinck
Juri Tetzlaff · Rundfunkchor Berlin · Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin · Steffen Tast

2CD-Set · C5506 PC: 21 UPC: 845221055060

In 1908, Maurice Maeterlinck wrote his play The Blue Bird (L’Oiseau bleu). Having proved a good source of operatic subjects before (Pelléas et MélisandeAriane et Barbe-Bleue), it is no surprise that composers jumped at the opportunity to write music to this latest. The French composer Albert Wolff made an opera of it that, though premiered at the MET, has since been forgotten. But even before that, in 1912, Max Reinhardt put it on as an adapted Christmas play in Berlin and he had none less than Engelbert Humperdinck write the incidental music to it. The music was never published until Steffen Tast found the score and salvaged it for us to hear. A sweet story and sweeter still music by Humperdinck newly discovered? Why, that’s in and of itself as though it was Christmas!

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Leo Blech: Alpenkönig und Menschenfeind

(The Alpine King and the Misanthrope) Opera
Collett · Saemundsson · Opernchor Aachen · Sinfonieorchester Aachen · CHRISTOPHER WARD

2CD-Set · C5478 PC: 22 UPC: 845221054780

Around 1902 Leo Blech nabbed the subject of the “original romantic-comic magic” play by Viennese theater manager/actor/playwright Ferdinand Raimund, had it streamlined, and turned it into his fifth opera. A cantankerous misanthrope terrorizes family and servants with his paranoid mistrust. He’s only cured when faced with his own behavior courtesy of supernatural role reversal. Highbrow opera meets folksy farce with unexpectedly gorgeous, splendidly orchestrated music somewhere between Wagner and Humperdinck. The premiere at the Dresden Court Theater was a sensational success. Then all of Blech’s music was banned and once the Nazi horror was over, it never came back. Now you can hear what we missed.

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LEO BLECH (1871-1958) Orchestral Works

Orchestral Songs
Sonja Gornik · Opernchor Aachen · Sinfonieorchester Aachen · Christopher Ward

C5481 PC: 21 UPC: 845221054810

The closest Leo Blech (1880–1959) gets to fame these days is being mistaken for Ernest Bloch. Actually, some might still remember his seminal work as an opera conductor in Berlin, where he worked for almost half a century (except for the Nazi years). But his compositions – either operas or involving the voice in some other way – have disappeared from the repertoire. What a shame, because his music is, while less probing than that of his contemporary Bloch’s, very much charming in the style of, say, Humperdinck or Rheinberger.

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JOACHIM RAFF Choral Works a cappella

Ave Maria · Pater noster Ten Songs for mixed choir · Four Marian Antiphons
Basler Madrigalisten · Raphael Immoos

C5501 PC: 21 UPC: 845221055015

Having written 11+ very fine romantic symphonies but never getting them played in concert? That’s Raff. Joachim Raff, sometime assistant and orchestrator of Franz Liszt’s. If the symphonies haven’t yet quite done the trick, maybe his acapella music will. It shows Raff at his most diverse and imaginative best. Vacillating between small-r republican liberalism and intellectual Catholicism, he wrote sacred works and secular political songs of awakening alike. Translated into music, this meant that he drew on the romantic vernacular of the time but could combine it with his very own take on the Cecilian revival of renaissance polyphony in a way rivaled only decades later, by Hans Pfitzner.

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#bruckner24 Symphony #3 (1873)

(Complete Versions Edition)
ORF VIENNA RADIO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA · MARKUS POSCHNER

C8086 PC: 21 UPC: 845221080864

This Complete Versions Edition includes all versions published or to be published under the auspices of the Austrian National Library and the International Bruckner Society in the Neue Anton Bruckner Gesamtausgabe (The New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition)
Bruckner revised his Third Symphony more than any other: There are three manuscript versions, two published versions from within his lifetime, a separate manuscript of the Adagio, and surviving revision fragments from 1874, 1875, and 1876.  In its first version (here recorded), it is Bruckner’s longest and most overtly Wagnerian symphony. When Brucknerian extraordinaire Robert Simpson got to study Nowak’s edition of this version in 1977, he threw his hitherto held opinions overboard and declared it an “achievement… progressively maimed in successive versions.” As part of this completist cycle, Markus Poschner will present the work in all states of pruning, but this is the obvious point to start at.


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