You Are Wolf

Musical institutions have their funny ideas, and the quirk of the Prague Conservatoire in the 1880s was that if you were an instrumentalist you couldn't be a composer, too (evidently no one had told them about Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin et al). At his father's insistence Léhar was enrolled as a violinist, but his real interest lay in composition. He took a few secret lessons from Fibich and had the opportunity to play his D minor sonata to Dvorak, who urged him to give up the violin and switch to the composition classes. But Léhar senior was adamant and Lèhar is to be considered as practically a self-taught composer.

The 1972 live album Live and Cookin' at Alice's Revisited is a great document of Wolf toward the end, still capable of bringing the heat and rocking the house down to the last brick. Of special note are the wild and wooly takes on "I Had a Dream," "I Didn't Know," and Muddy Waters' "Mean Mistreater." There are mistakes galore out of the band and some P.A. system feedback here and there, both of which only add to the charm of it all. A compact-disc reissue added two stellar bonus cuts. The first one, "Big House," first showed up on a hodge-podge Wolf bootleg album from the '70s. Its non-appearance on the original album is somewhat of a mystery since it's arguably one of the best performances here./quote]

The classical period was one of those moments in history where the style itself was so powerful that composers of relatively modest ability, with a little luck and few good ideas, could write some outstanding music. Ernst Wilhelm Wolf’s Symphony in F is an excellent example of this phenomenon. A resident composer active in Weimar, Wolf (1732-92) composed about 35 symphonies, of which 26 survive. Like Handel’s organ concertos, they were written primarily for use as overtures and intermezzos during theatrical productions, and the short D major symphony, with trumpets and drums, clearly gives evidence of this provenance. The other three works, whether in three or four movements, are larger in scale, and certainly are rich enough in content to warrant an independent concert life.