Hart / Collins / Mccallum - Complete Music 1 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Since 2017 Golo Berg has been the general music director of the Munster Symphony Orchestra, which was founded by the composer Fritz Volbach in 1919. It was only logical that Berg would also occupy himself with the composer around this centennial year, and Volbach turned out to be a significant personality both as a musicologist and as a composer. Berg and cpo both were surprised by the originality and high quality of these works. During the first decade of the twentieth century Volbach's name continued to be thoroughly familiar to people who were interested in music; his works were regularly included in programs, but then they were forgotten somewhat. Volbach's most popular works included the Symphonic Poem InchEs waren zwei KonigskinderInch based on the famous folk ballad of the same name. Like Richard Strauss in Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Volbach drew on this universally familiar material of folk character in response to the turn-of-the-century predilection for German tales and sagas. He attached great importance to clear structure and an intelligible musical realization, so that the story of the two enamored but unlucky royal children can be imagined without difficulty. The subsequently composed Symphony in B minor formed the crowning conclusion of Volbach's instrumental music for orchestral ensembles. It represents, so to speak, the Inchroyal categoryInch at the end of his development inasmuch as his aim in this form was to demonstrate his true mastery as a composer.

Pál Hermann, born in Budapest in 1902, was not only one of the leading cellists of his generation he was also an important composer, one of the major figures in Hungarian music in the generation after his teachers Bartók and Kodály. But since only two of his works were published before his early death, in 1944, at the hands of the Nazis, and many more of them were lost, he has not had the esteem that he deserves. This series will present all his surviving compositions, most of them in first recordings. The major work on this first album, Hermann's Cello Concerto of 1925 in a reconstruction by the Italian composer Fabio Conti (b. 1967), sits somewhere between Bartók and Korngold and bids fair to become a staple of the cello repertoire.

Leo Ornstein is as well known for his extraordinary longevity as for his music he was born in Ukraine in 1893 and died in Wisconsin in 2002, aged at least 108. His generous output of music, much of it for the piano, his own instrument, remains poorly known, although it can stand shoulder to shoulder with that of many better-known names. Many of the pieces here - which cover a span of over 60 years - have their roots in Debussy, Skryabin and Szymanowski, but Ornstein welds those influences into an edgy, energetic language very much his own. The Three Moods of c. 1914 are anger, grief and joy, but there is strength of feeling in all the music to be heard here. Indeed, the Nine Vignettes bear a misleading title they are substantial and powerful virtuoso essays which can flare up into moments of startling power and violence; hitherto unknown, they constitute a major contribution to the piano literature.