SKU: CA.410300

ISBN 9790007076054.

Franz Schreker had a long and close association with choral music. As founder and director of Vienna's Philharmonic Chorus he led world premieres and first performances of works by contemporary composers. It is surprising, therefore, that Schreker wrote relatively few independent choral works; only three of these works (with various scorings) were published in his lifetime. Now, for the first time this critical edition, prepared by Christopher Hailey, director of the Franz Schreker Foundation, makes available a body of works that sheds new light on Schreker's musical evolution and, in its own right, constitutes a notable addition to twentieth-century choral literature.

SKU: CA.751005

ISBN 9790007113407. Language: German.

Franz Schreker was an important representative of the Wiener Moderne and one of the most successful opera composers at the beginning of the 20th century. To conclude his studies at the Vienna Conservatory he set Psalm 116 for women's choir and orchestra (1900) and dedicated to his beloved teacher Robert Fuchs, in reverence. Fuchs, the highly respected composition teacher, was a close friend of Johannes Brahms and a champion of Brahms's romantic classicism. Thus, Schreker's psalm setting closely follows the tonal language of Brahms. In 1901 Psalm 116 was first performed in a concert of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, and was first published in the same year by the Viennese publisher Adolf Robitschek. The scoring of the psalm is identical with that of Brahms's Deutsches Requiem, which would suggest and facilitate a performance of both these on the same concert program. Score available separately - see item CA.751000.

SKU: HL.48025043

UPC: 196288021728.

Ignace Strasfogel (1909 - 1994), a master student of Franz Schreker and Leonid Kreutzer, the youngest student at the Berlin Hochschule and the youngest recipient of the prestigious Mendelssohn Prize of the Weimar Republic, made a career as a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera after his emigration in 1934. His String Quartet No. 1, probably written in 1927 as the final work of his studies with Schreker, is an early work of the highest perfection. In the first of the two movements, grotesque-capricious scenariosare revitalized by contrapuntal artistry. The second, non less polypohnic, is a widely branched scherzo with an elegiac trio section. Just as striking is the harmony: With individually shaping of all four parts, all facets up to polytonality and complete detachment from functional tonality are explored - in a certain affinity with the musical language of Alban Berg, not without tongue-in-cheek references to the neoclassicism of the 1920s. A just as original as important contribution to the quartet repertoireof the early twentieth century.

SKU: TM.05723SC