im Moto

Wolfgang Sawallisch was a German conductor and pianist, known for his refined interpretations of orchestral and opera repertoire. As a pianist, he was a revered accompanist and chamber musician, as well as an accomplished soloist. He was born in 1923 in Munich to Maria and Wilhelm Sawallisch, and had a brother named Werner who was older by five years. He started learning the piano at age five, and by the age of ten he had already decided that he wanted to be a concert pianist as an adult. Upon graduating high school in Munich in 1942, he studied piano with Wolfgang Ruoff until he was drafted into the military, where he served in France and Italy with the Wehrmacht, a branch of the Nazi armed forces. During the final stages of World War II in 1945 he was captured and held in a British POW camp.

As a composer of instrumental music, Louis Spohr was second only to Beethoven in the category of widespread attention and recognition during the first half of the nineteenth century. After Beethoven's death in 1827 he was regarded by large segments of the music public as the greatest living composer. In 1828 the leading music critic Friedrich Rochlitz asked very rhetorically, 'Who else should now write symphonies?' Spohr was supposed to continue what Beethoven had begun. However, even then Spohr's symphonic music was recognized as the absolute opposite of the type of the Beethovian symphony. If genial musical license holds sway in Beethoven's oeuvre, then in Spohr classical order prevails.

Richard Strauss is most conspicuously represented in the symphony hall through a handful of the tone poems he produced from the late 1880s through the early years of the twentieth century, some of which—like Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel, and Thus Spake Zarathustra—represent high points of their genre. He seemed to draw a double-bar on that phase of his career after writing Symphonia domestica in 1902-03, and he returned to the genre only once more, when An Alpine Symphony occupied him from 1911 to 1915. Apart from that, his production of symphonic poems gave way to his growing interest in composing operas, which was most immediately manifested in Salome (premiered in 1905) and Elektra (1909).

Selim Palmgren, a student of Busoni, was one of the most prominent Finnish composer-pianists of his time, and his pieces for pedagogical use such as Kevätauerta (‘Spring Haze’) are still popular today. This programme reveals Palmgren’s versatility to the full, with the Deux contrastes describing opposite poles of melancholy and joyous playfulness, and the dreamy Prelude-Nocturne a jazz-tinted reminiscence of 1920s America. Displaying a wide variety of technical and stylistic challenges, Palmgren’s 24 Preludes also features one of the first examples of Impressionism in Nordic piano literature.