Rudi Stephan - Orchestral Works (Oleg Caetani)

Information

Composer: Rudi Stephan

1. Music for Violin and Orchestra (1911)
2. Music for Orchestra (1910)
3. Music for Orchestra (1912)

Sergey Stadler, violin
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Oleg Caetani, conductor

Date: 2005
Label: Chandos
https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%205040

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Review

Born in 1887, Rudi Stephan was another in that doomed generation of European young men: he was just beginning to make a name for himself when he met a military death in 1915. His admirers make strong claims for him. Juliane Brand, writing in New Grove II , states that “his œuvre bears the stamp of a strong personality with a distinctive voice”—and in his notes for this album, Gordon Kerry calls him “a major talent,” pointing out that “it has been argued that if Stephan had survived World War I the evolution of western music would have been quite different.” On the basis of the music that’s been recorded, though, I’d have to say that the evidence suggests otherwise. To my ears, Stephan was still struggling to find his own style when he died; and there’s little to make him stand out from the crowd. He certainly didn’t develop the kind of distinctive idiom heard in the music of Butterworth, another war casualty with whom he’s often compared; much less did he show the kind of early talent heard, say, in the music of Korngold.

Indeed, what’s most striking about this music is how familiar it sounds, as Stephan wades through the standard gestures of the post-Wagnerian sound world. The lush, slow, harmonically unstable outpourings of poignant nostalgia; the evocative tremolos; the rich counterpoint; the post-Brucknerian chorales, punched out with stentorian brass; the soaring horn lines; the bucolic solo winds, occasionally echoing bird calls: if you know your Delius, your Zemlinsky, your early Webern (the Passacaglia and, especially, In Sommerwind ), you won’t have any trouble orienting yourself in Stephan’s sound world. You may, though, find it difficult to follow his formal arguments: although Stephan resisted assigning programs to his music (hence, the exaggerated abstraction of the titles here), his music sounds , as it moves from idea to idea, as if there were a narrative lurking in the background. The 1910 Music for Orchestra , previously unrecorded, is especially problematic in this regard, seeming to end several times before it really winds down.

That said, it’s hard to deny the sheer hedonistic appeal of this music—especially if you listen in surround sound with the volume cranked up. Given the aesthetic world in which it was nourished, it’s a bit on the healthy side: Stephan was not as tormented as Berg, and even his darker music doesn’t have the perverse erotic pull of, say, Strauss’s Salomé . It therefore probably won’t wring you out the way the best music of the period can. Still, those who love the general style will find much to enjoy here.

This is currently the only available CD of Stephan’s music—so there’s no jockeying for a position in the catalog. That said, Hans Zender’s out-of-print 1983 Stephan recording with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (Schwann Music Mundi CD 11623)—which included the 1911 Music for Orchestra and the Music for Violin and Orchestra , as well as the Liebeszauber for baritone and orchestra—was more specific in gesture, more varied in color and mood, and more propulsive in outlook than Caetani’s, which is relatively slack. Hans Maile, on the earlier disc, articulates the solo violin part of Music for Violin and Orchestra more boldly than Sergey Stadler does, too. And while Schwann’s more close-up sound lacks the sheer all-enveloping luxury of Chandos’s, the gain in transparency actually makes a stronger case for the music’s worth. At the very least, the Schwann disc is worth considering as an alternative viewpoint, if you can manage to find it. In the meanwhile, this Chandos CD is well worth your attention.

-- Peter J. Rabinowitz, FANFARE

More reviews:
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/stephan-orchestral-works
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2006/Apr06/Stephan_CHSA5040.htm
https://www.allmusic.com/album/rudi-stephan-orchestral-works-mw0001850236
https://www.amazon.com/Rudi-Stephan-Orchestral-Works/dp/B000BLI36Q

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Rudi Stephan (29 July 1887 – 29 September 1915), was a German composer of great promise who was considered one of the leading talents among his generation. Stephan left only a few works: his liking for pointedly neutral titles along the lines of 'Music for ...' has caused him to be seen as a forerunner of the 'New Objectivity' of the post-war era, but his music is in fact in a hyper-expressive late-Romantic idiom. He completed his only opera, Die ersten Menschen, shortly after the outbreak of the war, and it was eventually premiered in Frankfurt, five years after his death from a bullet in the brain fired by a Russian sharpshooter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudi_Stephan

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Oleg Caetani (born 1956) is an Italian conductor. He was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, the son of the conductor and composer Igor Markevitch and his second wife Donna Topazia Caetani. Caetani studied with Nadia Boulanger, and also went to the Moscow Conservatory to study conducting with Kirill Kondrashin. He graduated from the St Petersburg Conservatory in conducting with Ilya Musin. Among Caetani's recordings are the first complete cycle of the Shostakovich symphonies recorded by an Italian orchestra, the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, and the symphonic cycles by Tchaikovsky and Gounod.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Caetani

http://www.olegcaetani.com/

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