Rudi Stephan: Orchestral Works

Rudi Stephan was a promising German composer whose life, like that of George Butterworth, was snuffed out in the heat of battle during "The War to End All Wars." Behind him, Stephan left a tiny output of 33 works, and of these, Music for Orchestra 1912 has proven by far the best known, receiving a decent amount of exposure in the concert halls of German-speaking lands since its 1912 premiere. None of Stephan's music has been recorded with any great frequency, and Chandos' deluxe Super Audio CD Rudi Stephen: Orchestral Works enters the field practically on its own.

Conductor Oleg Caetani leads the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the only three orchestral works Stephan has, and one of them, Music for Orchestra 1910, appears on disc for the first time here. In the concerted Music for Violin and Orchestra, Caetani is joined by violin soloist Sergei Stadler, and all of the foregoing performers acquit themselves with distinction in this little-known music. Nevertheless, it is the music, and not the performances per se, that grabs one's attention. Stephan's music is firmly post-Romantic in idiom, reminiscent to some extent of late Mahler or early to middle Richard Strauss, but only superficially. Stephan favors a painstaking approach toward thematic development, similar to that of Bruckner, but generally at much slower tempi. Stephan's orchestra is large, but his textures are often thinly scored, and while his music is neither harsh nor modernistic, it is not harmonically conventional, either.