Willy Burkhard was a hard-working Swiss composer who battled ill health for much of his life. Despite his infirmity and the miseries of enduring the Nazi period, Burkhard made good use of his time, producing a little over 100 works in his 55 years. His sacred music, surveyed in part on Musiques Suisses' release Willy Burkhard: Geistliche Musik, is certainly one of Burkhard's selling points; it bears some common features with Hugo Distler, though is lacking in Distler's unfathomable harmonic magic. Burkhard's work is by ...
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Willy Burkhard was a hard-working Swiss composer who battled ill health for much of his life. Despite his infirmity and the miseries of enduring the Nazi period, Burkhard made good use of his time, producing a little over 100 works in his 55 years. His sacred music, surveyed in part on Musiques Suisses' release Willy Burkhard: Geistliche Musik, is certainly one of Burkhard's selling points; it bears some common features with Hugo Distler, though is lacking in Distler's unfathomable harmonic magic. Burkhard's work is by varying degrees reminiscent of Ernst Pepping, Messiaen, Orff, and very early Webern of the vintage of the chorus Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen, Op. 2. Max Reger is a detectable influence in Burkhard's writing for organ, more so in its greatly expanded harmonic approach than in the use of dense, clotted polyphony that for the most part Burkhard avoids. In the main, Burkhard's sound is his own, embracing some aspects of the neo-Baroque but not backward looking, and his harmonic profile is...
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