Brass Roland

Wetz was already 40 years old when he embarked on composing his First Symphony and the Brucknerian influence is clear from the start, with expansive themes, leisurely transitions and an architectural building of climaxes all descending from that master’s technical toolbox. You might mistake this for Bruckner if you don’t really know Bruckner, but even with the master’s fingerprints in evidence all over the place you have to admit there is a talent at work with some steps made towards finding a more original voice.

Bach contemporaries such as Jan Zelenka (1679-1745) and Johann Pisendel (1687-1755), both of whom spent most of their creative lives at the Dresden court, are enjoying a well-deserved period of “discovery”–and so is Johann Schein (1586-1630), a less-interesting contemporary of Bach’s most illustrious predecessor, Heinrich Schütz, who preceded Bach as Kantor in Leipzig by a little more than a century. Schein’s primary claim to importance is his incorporation of Italian madrigal style into Lutheran church music. But it’s also clear that he was influenced by the big block-chord sound and antiphonal choir scoring favored by Gabrieli and similarly employed by Schütz.