If the name of German composer Walter Braunfels is known at all today, it is through the revival of his 1920 opera Die Vogel, issued in 1996 in a performance led by Lothar Zagrosek in Decca's now defunct Entarte Musik series. Conductor Dennis Russell Davies here returns with a sampling of Braunfels' orchestral music in a CPO offering with the Radio Symphonieochester Wien, Braunfels: Phantastische Erscheinungen. The title work is an expansive and rather long set of 12 variations on a theme of Hector Berlioz and support is ...
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If the name of German composer Walter Braunfels is known at all today, it is through the revival of his 1920 opera Die Vogel, issued in 1996 in a performance led by Lothar Zagrosek in Decca's now defunct Entarte Musik series. Conductor Dennis Russell Davies here returns with a sampling of Braunfels' orchestral music in a CPO offering with the Radio Symphonieochester Wien, Braunfels: Phantastische Erscheinungen. The title work is an expansive and rather long set of 12 variations on a theme of Hector Berlioz and support is provided by the early Serenade, Op. 20, a work dating from 1910.Braunfels' style is typically evaluated as being in the mode of "expanded tonality," but these works, both of which date from before 1920, are in a securely post-Romantic idiom. Additionally, Braunfels' music is conservative even in comparison with Richard Strauss, with certain sections replicating the sound of Wagner's orchestral music with no sense of parody or morphology -- just straight imitation. It is pleasant music,...
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