The title of this release -- Discoveries, Arrangements -- is a bit misleading, for there's really only one discovery. Even it is not completely new, although it certainly qualifies as a Schubert rarity and should attract the Schubert hardcore who seem to be the album's target audience. That work is Adrast, D. 137, a fragment of a singspiel to a text written by Johann Mayrhofer. The work was apparently unfinished, but it was known to the great Schubert editor Eusebius Mandyczewski and occasionally performed in fragments. ...
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The title of this release -- Discoveries, Arrangements -- is a bit misleading, for there's really only one discovery. Even it is not completely new, although it certainly qualifies as a Schubert rarity and should attract the Schubert hardcore who seem to be the album's target audience. That work is Adrast, D. 137, a fragment of a singspiel to a text written by Johann Mayrhofer. The work was apparently unfinished, but it was known to the great Schubert editor Eusebius Mandyczewski and occasionally performed in fragments. Here several numbers have been re-edited according to new information (the only real "Entdeckung" involved), and the results do indeed show how close Schubert came to becoming a great dramatic composer. Mayrhofer's story is an adaptation of a legend from the Greek historian Herodotus, bearing some similarity to that of Oedipus the King; the titular character is condemned by fate to twice murder those close to him. The surviving numbers give an idea of the dramatic contrasts the work...
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