Egon Bittner

Only a few Austrian composers (Webern, for example) elected to stay in their homeland after Nazi Germany annexed the country in 1938. Of those who left, some went to America (Schoenberg) while others went to England (Egon Wellesz). Whether they stayed or left, Austrian composers continued to write distinctly Austrian music in their own distinctive voices. In this disc of Wellesz's 1933 Piano Concerto and 1961 Violin Concerto, the musical language remains the same, fundamentally tonal in harmony, though with strong chromatic and atonal accents and essentially romantic in style, though with a dash more irony and a dollop more anguish. Both pieces are given exemplary performances by conductor Roger Epple leading the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, with Margarete Babinsky as the soloist in the Piano Concerto and David Frühwirth in the Violin Concerto.

An Original Jackets treasury of analogue-era pianism by legendary and lesser-known names from the catalogues of American Decca and Westminster.

The pieces published in 1682 and 1702 under the name Jacques Bittner are among the better-known prints of music for the 11-course lute in the German-speaking world between Reusner and Weiss.