Dip Your Ears, No. 171 (Orchestral Eduard Franck)

Eduard Franck, Roman Carnival Overture, Concert Piece for Violin & Orchestra, Fantasy for Orchestra op.16, Concert Overture for large Orchestra op.12 C.Erdinger / O.Rudner / Württemberg Phil. Reutlingen audite 97686

Musical Sunshine

Eduard Franck (ditto his son Richard) is an ingenious chamber music composer whose output has been championed by the Audite label and Franck-veteran violinist Christiane Edinger. Now they turn their attention to Eduard’s orchestral output, including a rustic-operatic overture that is comically true to the clichés its title, Roman Carnival, promises. It’s followed by a gorgeous miniature violin concerto with a simple, memorably charming tune. Like the Orchestral Fantasy, this is music with a genial La-Z-Boy quality about it and, yes, a touch on the harmless side. But when it’s as well done as here, what’s wrong with musical sunshine and cotton candy?

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Listen Up: Wagner in Saxony—Revolution, ma non Troppo

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Wagner the Revolutionary

Saxony at long last honors its prodigal, politically ambivalent son.

When Röckel laid out a radical socialist program for the future, there were two points Wagner found himself unable to agree with: the abolition of marriage and, tellingly, the equal treatment of all workers. Without a special status for artists, Wagner wasn’t going to sign off on such an idea.

Wagner escaped certain imprisonment and possible death in Dresden by a hair’s breadth, via Chemnitz and Weimar to Zurich. As soon as he was in the clear he sent a letter to his wife Minna in which he assures her that this “worst possible catastrophe” that he had just experienced was something from which he “emerged a changed man, set on a new path.” Furthermore Wagner claimed that he really wasn’t a revolutionary at heart because a victorious revolutionary has to be ruthless to the core — a quality he simply couldn’t possess...

Available in the current issue of Listen Magazine.

Listen Up: Franz Mittler Unsung

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Franz Mittler: An Affair of the Ear

The twentieth-century jack found many musical trades.

You might describe Mittler as the Francis Poulenc of Entartete Musik. His settings of poems by Wilhelm Busch—the godfather of cartoons—are priceless. And his adopted homeland didn't remain un-composed: The Manhattan Suite (1947) includes a "Song of the Subway" and "Waltzing in Central Park."

Despite the Brahms pedigree, Mittler had no time for excessive seriousness. Even the severe form of the string quartet refuses furrowed brows and gets infused with Mittlerian vivaciousness: The 1909 Quartet No. 1 sounds like an old acquaintance from its very first notes—in a happy, not derivative, sort of way...

Available in the current issue of Listen Magazine and digitally here.

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Listen Up: Remembering Fischer Dieskau

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A Voice from Ruins

An appraisal of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

When Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau passed away this year, there were few superlatives raining down on him in obituaries that hadn’t already been used during his lifetime. He was one of three or four giants in classical music who were able to shape the cultural landscape — and he was the last one. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau need not have been your favorite singer in order to acknowledge his greatness and importance.

Like Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein, Fischer-Dieskau arrived right at the time when recording technology allowed for the easier-than-ever dissemination of music, when competition was limited, and when classical music still defined mainstream culture, even for those who didn’t much care for it. With some four hundred records to his name, Fischer-Dieskau became one of the most recorded singers of all time. In Germany he is called Der Jahrhundertsänger — literally that’s “singer of the century,” or “hundred-year singer,” although neither translation does justice to the air of veneration the term connotes. His complete recordings of Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Wolf, Beethoven and Brahms and copious doses of other, less well-known Lieder composers were the record collector’s natural (and often sole) choice. There are few classical-music listeners above the age of thirty-five for whom Fischer-Dieskau’s interpretations of this repertoire didn’t leave the emotional footprint of first exposure.

The quantity and, at its best, quality, intelligence and matter-of-course-ness of his Lieder singing made German art songs known, even popular, in non-German-speaking countries. American critics, marveling at the quality of his Lied interpretations, were more reserved in their Fischer- Dieskaumania than their German and English colleagues, but not by much. Harold C. Schonberg called him “the most protean singer alive today,” saying he was “acknowledged to be the greatest of contemporary lieder singers [who] has triumphed in opera . . . from Handel to Henze [and] a stalwart in oratorio work.” Donal Henahan referred to Fischer-Dieskau as “that paragon of 20th-century singers.”

Continued here.