Composer: Julius Bittner
Orchestra: Siberian Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Dmitry Vasiliev
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Toccata
Catalogue: TOCC0500
Release: 2019
Size: 646 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
01. Vaterland
Symphony No. 1 in F minor
02. I. Allegro
03. II. Sehr langsam
04. III. Sehr rasch – Etwas langsamer
05. IV. Sehr rasch
The name of the Austrian composer Julius Bittner (1874–1939) has been almost entirely lost from view, and yet he was one of the most successful composers of opera and operetta of his day, a mainstay of musical Vienna. Unusually, Bittner was also a practicing lawyer; more unusually still, he was a double amputee, the result of the ravages of diabetes. None of his orchestral music has been recorded before – astonishingly, given the quality of the two works presented here. Vaterland is an expansive, Lisztian symphonic poem written on a patriotic impulse early in the First World War; and Bittner’s ambitious First Symphony, which has its starting point in Brahms and Bruckner, is a major piece of late-Romantic musical architecture, both tuneful and grandiose.