Richard Stöhr: Orchestral Music Volume Three

Richard Stöhr: Orchestral Music Volume Three

TOCC 0743 (Toccata Classics, CD)

FIRST RELEASE (1 November 2024)

Playing time: 56'
Tracks: 6
Booklet pages: 24
℗ 2024 Toccata Classics
© 2024 Toccata Classics
Main country of recording: Poland
Reviewer: Geoff Pearce
Review of Richard Stöhr: Orchestral Music Volume Three published on 18 October 2024

Sinfonia Varsovia
Ian Hobson, conductor

Richard Franz Stöhr (1874-1967):

1 Per Aspera ad Astra, Festival Overture for Concert Band, Op 79a (1942) (first recording)

2 Two Roads to Victory (Through Arms - Through Love), Festival Overture for Concert Band, Op 79b (1942) (first recording)

Symphony No 2 in D minor, Op 81 (1942) (first recording)
3 Allegro energico
4 Andante
5 Vivace
6 Allegro con fuoco

Richard Stöhr (1874–1967) is an exiled late-Romantic Austrian. Toccata's third volume of his orchestral music contains three works written in 1942: two works for concert band, the 'Festival Overture' Per Aspera ad Astra, Op 79a, and the 'Musical Poem' Two Roads to Victory, Op 79b - both doubtless responses to the war he had narrowly escaped - and the Symphony No 2 in D minor, Op 81. All three works receive their first recordings here. Like so many important Austrian musicians forced into American exile by the Nazis, Stöhr suddenly found himself cast from celebrity into obscurity. The optimism and energy, even defiance, of these three works suggest that he took it in his stride, with his musical language retaining its Viennese accent in an individual amalgam of Bruckner, Mahler, Schmidt and Korngold. Indeed, the echoes of Mahler in Stöhr's Second Symphony may be a deliberate homage if, as seems possible, this 1942 version is a revision of a now-lost work first composed shortly after Mahler's death.

Recorded 5-8 March 2023 (Symphony No 2) and 14-15 November 2023 (Op 79) in the Witold Lutosławski Concert Studio (S1), Polish Radio, Warsaw, Poland.

 

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