'68 1 4

Schumann's career very nearly took a very direction. He had planned to be a writer and a lawyer, and it was the experience of hearing Paganini play in 1830 that provided the impetus to set the young man on a path that would eventually see him become one of the great romantic composers. Having chosen this path, (he had dabbled as a composer in his childhood, and his father considered sending him to Weber for tuition). Schumann found composition anything but easy. A pianist of considerable prowess, he worshipped ……

Mario Venzago’s recordings of Bruckner symphonies with the Tapiola Sinfonietta and other chamber orchestras raised eyebrows and furrowed brows. I doubt his Brahms will provoke much if any controversy. It’s now more than two decades since the release of Charles Mackerras’s pioneering set with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – discs that were clearly labelled ‘in the style of the original Meiningen performances’, presumably to assure buyers that there was historical precedence behind the notion of a smallish orchestra playing the canonical Brahms four.

New Jersey-born George Antheil travelled to Europe in 1922 determined to become “noted and notorious” as a pianist-composer, soon gaining a reputation as the “bad boy of music” with works such as the infamous Ballet mécanique. The first three violin sonatas come from this period, with the eclectic Violin Sonata No. 1 displaying the fiercely barbaric influence of Stravinsky, and the more jazzy No. 2 developing experiments in “musical cubism”. His Violin Sonata No. 3 achieves a synthesis of Stravinskian rhythms and Antheil’s more song-like tendencies, while the later No. 4 is built on Classical and Baroque models.

The German composer Draeseke wrote four symphonies. All of them are now to be heard spread across three CPO discs played in a uniform edition by the NDR Radiophilharmonie conducted by Jörg-Peter Weigle. You can also hear a Wuppertal-based reading of the First Symphony coupled with the Draeseke Piano Concerto on MDG 335 1041.