Ernst Pepping was once hot stuff, with conductors of Furtwängler's ilk recording his works. Indeed, there remains a famous 1943 recording of Pepping's Second Symphony with Furtwängler leading the Berliner Philharmoniker that has been reissued on a variety of labels. The conservative German modernist's star has sunk since then, however, and there are barely a handful of his works in print on CD. Pepping's Passion According to St. Matthew, for example, received over 500 performance in the first five years after its premiere, ...
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Ernst Pepping was once hot stuff, with conductors of Furtwängler's ilk recording his works. Indeed, there remains a famous 1943 recording of Pepping's Second Symphony with Furtwängler leading the Berliner Philharmoniker that has been reissued on a variety of labels. The conservative German modernist's star has sunk since then, however, and there are barely a handful of his works in print on CD. Pepping's Passion According to St. Matthew, for example, received over 500 performance in the first five years after its premiere, but this recording with Stefan Parkman leading the Rundfunkchor Berlin from 2007 is only the second of the digital age -- and the first was from 1991. Perhaps its stern tonality and severe expressivity explain the work's drop in popular standing. There's no atonality and very little chromaticism here; in fact, strictly speaking, there's hardly any counterpoint at all and next to no melody. There are expressive unison declamations that sometimes branch out into thirds or fourths that...
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