These are world première recordings in Sterling's Romantic Swiss music series. Hans Huber was amongst the leading musical personalities in the German-speaking part of Switzerland in the years around the beginning of the 20th century. He was born in 1852 in a small community in the north-west Swiss canton of Solothurn. He studied under Carl Reinecke in Leipzig and subsequently taught music in Alsace from where he made his first contacts with musical life in Basel where he moved in 1877.
It’s interesting that Georg Solti’s recordings of Strauss tone poems seem never to have gotten the attention that they deserve. True, he did not program them with the same frequency and comprehensiveness that he did Strauss’ contemporary Mahler, but Solti’s credentials as an exciting and idiomatic conductor of the operas have never been questioned. He knew and worked with the composer personally from his days at the helm of the Munich opera after the Second World War, and more to the point, he plays this music with just the kind of directness and virtuosity that it demands.