Gurlitt - Goya-Symphony & Four Dramatic Songs
World Première Recordings
Christiane Oelze (soprano)
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Antony Beaumont
Gurlitt's Goya Symphony of 1939 uses the suffering of the Spanish painter in life and work as an allegory of existence in the Third Reich. The playing of the Berlin Radio SO here has vitality...
Gurlitt - Goya-Symphony & Four Dramatic Songs
World Première Recordings
Christiane Oelze (soprano)
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Antony Beaumont
Purchase product
Gurlitt's Goya Symphony of 1939 uses the suffering of the Spanish painter in life and work as an allegory of existence in the Third Reich. The playing of the Berlin Radio SO here has vitality...
About
German composer and conductor Manfred Gurlitt was a ‘progressive post romantic’ with a unique and distinctive mode of expression. He founded the Society for New Music in Bremen in 1920 to promote avant-garde and rarely-heard classical works. However, after the rise of the Nazis he was denounced as a 'cultural Bolshevist' and was forced to emigrate.
True to their ethic of rediscovering little known composers, Phoenix Edition here presents the world première recordings of his Four Dramatic Songs and Goya Symphony
Contents and tracklist
Awards and reviews
May 2009
Gurlitt's Goya Symphony of 1939 uses the suffering of the Spanish painter in life and work as an allegory of existence in the Third Reich. The playing of the Berlin Radio SO here has vitality and warmth and the recording is particularly clear and immediate.
15th August 2008
The Goya Symphony was apparently inspired by a visit to the Prado in 1933, but its pallid neoclassicism, designed to curry favour with the Third Reich, lacks the pungency of the Spanish artist's canvases. The Four Dramatic Songs from 1952 are more convincing, harking back to early Schoenberg, and Christiane Oelze sings them with cool intensity. But even so, they are no great discovery.
