Xabier Rott

The 1989 premiere of Hans Rott's Symphony No. 1 in E major (it was written more than 100 years earlier) introduced the international music world to a composer who had remained unknown, or known by name only, even among experts. His colleagues and friends included the younger composers Gustav Mahler and Hugo Wolf. Besides Wagner, Bruckner was the most important model for Rott’s first symphonic work. Written when he was barely twenty years old, the work stands as his magnum opus, his only completed major work, a synthesis of what he had written to date, and a proclamation of what might have been yet to come.

Fortune dealt Hans Rott a cruel hand. The Austrian composer, born in Vienna in 1858, struggled as a freelance musician and died at the age of twenty-five soon after succumbing to mental illness. Rott’s name lives on thanks to his Symphony No. 1 in E major and receives top billing in a new recording of the work by the Bamberger Symphoniker and its Chief Conductor Jakub Hrůša. They complete their programme with the Symphonic Prelude by Rott’s organ teacher Anton Bruckner and “Blumine” by his friend and fellow Vienna Conservatory student Gustav Mahler.

Hans Rott was a friend of Gustav Mahler's and Hugo Wolf's in their conservatory days, and his career was to end sadly, like Wolf's, in madness probably brought on by syphilis. While traveling by rail to take up a job as a choral director, his mind gave way and he claimed that Brahms had rigged the train to explode. He never reported for work, obviously.

Hans Rott was a composer from Gustav Mahler’s environment who had been unknown or known only by name even to most pundits. Many people have expressed the opinion, perhaps justifiably, that only his tragic fate prevented him from going down in the annals of music as Mahler’s equal and establishing a permanent position in the repertoire. A member of Bruckner’s circle within the music scene in Vienna, he developed a pronounced antipathy towards Johannes Brahms. In view of many of his works, it is difficult to comprehend that during Rott’s lifetime presumably not one of them was performed in public, but that only presentations took place under the aegis of internal conservatory events. With these recordings Capriccio attend to fill the gap with his (some of them reconstructed) orchestral works and document these fascinating world of music for the eternity.

Like his father, Neeme Järvi, Paavo Järvi is an internationally renowned classical music conductor of Estonian heritage with a deep catalog of recordings. Born on December 30, 1962, in Tallinn, Estonia, he and his family moved to the United States in 1980. His education includes studies at the Tallinn School of Music, the Curtis Institute of Music, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute. For a decade he served as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra prior to being named music director of the Orchestre de Paris.