Radio Silenc e

At a time when many of his contemporaries were exploring more fluid structures, Franz Schmidt while perhaps stretching tonal harmony to its limits, continued to embrace 19th-century form and achieved a highly personal synthesis of the diverse traditions of the Austro-German symphony. His language, rather than being wedded to a narrative of dissolution and tragedy is radiant and belligerently optimistic and reveals this scion of largely Hungarian forebears as the last great exponent of the style hongrois after Schubert, Liszt and Brahms.

The Netherlands Radio Choir and its chief conductor Benjamin Goodson bring together choral works by Josef Rheinberger and Felix Mendelssohn, presenting some of the greatest choral compositions of the nineteenth century. This recording begins with Rheinberger’s rarely-recorded Mass in E-Flat Major and closes with the composer’s stirringly beautiful Abendlied. Four of Mendelssohn’s most expressive and original psalm settings are paired with his lesser-known Sechs Sprüche, powerful choral miniatures that reflect on key moments in the church year. These pieces are performed in a warm, intimate acoustic, allowing the words and remarkable detail in this music to be heard and relished.

Fréderick Franssen: From among the enormous choice of horn repertoire available in the early stages of my study of the instrument, my interest was piqued by the very earliest horn music. The music from that era did and still does exert its magic on me due to the pure beauty of its clear and transparent sound world. One of my first finds on this quest of discovery through the Baroque period was a concerto by an unknown hand, which appears on this album and comes from a very special collection – the ‘Wenster’. The library at the University of Lund in Sweden contains one of the largest collections of horn music from the first half of the 18th century, under the name of ‘Wenster’. The manuscript contains 18 works, with virtually all of the composers having some sort of connection to the city of Dresden, and it may have been transcribed by a travelling horn player during a visit to that city. The six works on this recording are all taken from this collection.

Mozart composed his last three symphonies (Nos. 39-41) in the space of six weeks during the summer of 1788, at a time when he had sunk into poverty, regularly borrowing money from his friend Michael Puchberg and pawning household items. In recent years he had been organising many concerts in Vienna and was equally in demand as a teacher. Then, in Prague, he had enjoyed the tremendous acclaim of his Marriage of Figaro (1786) and Don Giovanni (1787). Now, however, he struggled to find subscribers for the publication of three string quintets and faced what seemed to be the end of his Viennese concerts.