Rundfunkchor Berlin Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin Kalitzke - Genesis - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Hans Winterberg grew up in Prague where he was one of a whole cadre of composers in the new Czech musical tradition. He is one of the few Jewish composers who survived the terror of World War II. His tale of survival is complicated and involved him, as a Czech Jew, having to seek refuge in post-war Germany, whereas contemporaries and colleagues like Viktor Ullmann, Erwin Schulhoff, and Hans Krása died in the concentration camps. He saw his music as Incha bridgeInch between the Slavic East and the West and admitted at one point that his musical starting point was Schoenberg. Audibly more present than Schoenberg, however, is a central European Impressionism, synthesized with complex rhythms.

The seductive, addictive potential of this music can be heard and felt straight away. His film music, an important pillar of his livelihood, embodies almost everything that characterizes Schnittke's music as a whole. It heralds a musical personality which, precisely because of it's conscious use of tradition in the twentieth century, represents a solitary exception. Curious - not greedy for the old - he collected discarded or worn-out remains of music history, cleaned and polished them, and placed them in strikingly new contexts. The principle of drawing from and making use of the past was not well received in the strongholds of the avant-garde, but was all the more enthusiastically embraced by film viewers and concertgoers. 25 years ago Schnittke had encouraged the young conductor, arranger, and film music expert Frank Strobel to condense the music of his film scores into suites and to republish them for concert use. Since then, Strobel has arranged around a third of Schnittke's over 60 pieces of film music and successively recorded them with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra.

The present recording is taken from a live transmission of the Academy concert of May 8, 1972, from the Nationaltheater in Munich. The early death of Karl Richter in February 1981 frustrated the intention of releasing one of the great oratorios from his performing repertoire, Joseph Haydn's InchCreationInch, in a studio recording. Happily it has proved possible to obtain the present sound recording from the archives of the Bayerische Staatsoper and, with the kind consent of the participants, to prepare a technically enhanced . Despite a number of remaining technical inadequacies, such as may be considered characteristic for historic recordings of this nature, this audio document gives a particularly fine impression of the ambience and the authenticity of a live performance with conductor Karl Richter - complementing, as it were, the many available studio recordings of his wide-ranging musical repertoire. Special thanks are due to the musicians and all involved at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich. For his help in advance preparation of this project, we wish to thank by name the opera house's former Chief Executive of Administration Dr. Roland Felber!