Orchestral Music Volume 1 from Toccata Classics
The Austrian composer Walter Bricht (1904–70) – reportedly Franz Schmidt’s favourite student – was one of many musicians of Jewish ancestry who fled Vienna after the Anschluss for the safety of the USA; Bricht became a treasured professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. Fittingly, it is the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, also in Indiana, that has made the first album of Bricht’s music, in its own debut recording, thereby rescuing a major, and echt-Viennese, voice from eight decades of silence, and revealing a late-Romantic musical language that, like Schmidt’s, unites Baroque counterpoint, a Classical sense of form and Wagnerian chromatic harmony.
Symphonic Suite in A Minor
1. Unruhig bewegt, schwankend
2. Sehr langsam und ausdrucksvoll
3. Rasch
Verwehte Blätter (‘Scattered Leaves’): Eight Small Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 18b (1932)
1. Fliessend
2. Langsam und zart.
3. Stürmische bewegt
4. Rasch und leight
5. Sehr langsam
6. Fliessend
7. Langsam, ausdrucksvoll
8. Rasch
Symphony in A minor, Op. 33 (1934)
1. Mässig bewegt
2. Langsam
3. Intermezzo scherzando. Nicht zu rasch
4. Finale. Ziemlisch langsam Bewegt
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Piano Sonata No. 7, Op. 39 (1940), movement 1
Drei Lieder für Gesang und Klavier (November 23, 1932) [audio clip from "The Lonely Christ"]
Chaconne for String Quartet, 1967
Sonata in A minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 33 (1934), movement 1
Sonata for Flute and Piano (1964), movement 2
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For information on these or any other works, contact me.
Selected Works