Günter Wand, one of West Germany's most passionate advocates for contemporary music, was appointed director of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester in Cologne in 1945, and he immediately set the orchestra on a course of performing newly written music, as well as music that had been banned under the Nazis. This CD includes four modern classics (although two of them are little known in the U.S.) that Wand recorded with that orchestra and with the Norddeutscher Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester between 1960 and 1987. Wand ...
Read More
Günter Wand, one of West Germany's most passionate advocates for contemporary music, was appointed director of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester in Cologne in 1945, and he immediately set the orchestra on a course of performing newly written music, as well as music that had been banned under the Nazis. This CD includes four modern classics (although two of them are little known in the U.S.) that Wand recorded with that orchestra and with the Norddeutscher Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester between 1960 and 1987. Wand gives Stravinsky's Concerto for piano, winds, double bass, and kettledrums (the 1930 version of his Concerto for piano and wind instruments) an explosive reading, bubbling with insolence and high spirits, and pianist Nikita Magaloff contributes a comparably lively performance. Bernd Alois Zimmermann's 1953 Symphony in one movement is characterized by a fertility of invention, brightly colored orchestration, and an unerring sense of dramatic development that foreshadow the power of his...
Read Less
