Wetz

Violin Concerto was Wetz’s final large-scale work, and is one of, if not the best work in this collection. Cast in one movement but divided into four tracks on the CD, it sounds fantastic in the capable hands of Ulf Wallin, who relishes this work’s eloquence. There isn’t a huge amount of virtuoso writing for the soloist, and soaring lyrical shapes are more of a feature. Even the cadenza moments are more like ‘monologue’ passages with the orchestra never entirely receding, but with Wetz’s harmonic richness there is a great deal to get your teeth stuck into with this concerto, and indeed few passages where you have the feeling things could move along a bit quicker.

Wetz is master of his idiom. The work shows a good understanding of musical context. The style is very subtlety varied. This is a requiem that succeeds musically. Because the composer is master of the musical language he uses he is able to engage with what the text of the Requiem Mass is about. It is the traditional version in use at the time.

Richard Wetz's ultra-conservative Third Symphony, like his second, resembles sort of a cross between Bruckner and Max Bruch. Not that this explains anything useful. One thing's for sure, though: Wetz writes beautiful music. His themes sing, stay with you when listening, and offer clearly contrasting moods and images. While never calling attention to itself in an ostentatious manner, Wetz's orchestration elucidates his musical arguments with perfect clarity and efficiency. His harmony, both diatonic and tastefully chromatic, is gorgeous. There's more than a touch of Schubert in his mixture of major and minor modes, and he knows how to use both discrete dissonance and fluid rhythms to carry his melodies across the bar lines. In short, the guy knows how to write symphonically, and if he now appears to have been born a generation or more too late (the piece dates from 1922 but sounds more like 1872), that need not concern us now.

Richard Wetz (1875 — 1935) was a provincial composer in the truest sense of the word, comfortably writing music in the accepted German forms, using recognizably German/Austrian melodic material, and scoring with typically German conservatism. His Second Symphony was completed in 1919, but could have been written anytime between 1880 and the early 1930s. It sounds a lot like Bruckner, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Wagner, and the most interesting thing about it is the fact that it does not include a Scherzo, but rather has two large quick(-ish) movements surrounding a brief adagio.

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.