Johanna Doderer - Symphony No.2 "Bohinj"; Violin Concerto No.2

Johanna DODERER (b.1969) 

Symphony No. 2 (2014-15)

Violin Concerto No. 2 (2012)

Anne Schwanewilms (soprano), Yury Revich (violin)

Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz

 Ariane Matiakh

Both scores are remarkably well played and recorded. The symphony had not been aired prior to these sessions yet Ariane Matiakh secures much more than a dutiful run-through — Gramophone Magazine, January 2016

___________________

I had already known that Neoromanticism had even made inroads in the very heart of 20th-century modernism, Germany - home ot Darmstadt and of Stockhausen, because I've encountered (and championed) the music of Thomas Schmidt-Kowalski. But he always struck me as more of an hommage-artist, with his overt aping of the sound of Bruckner. Its with the music of Johanna Doderer (born 1969), that I know the more original approach, of new language found within the realm of tonality, had reached there too. Okay, technically she's Austrian, not German, but close enough. Her 2015 Symphony #2 "Bohinj" is a powerful, dramatic 50-minute work in three movements which at times feels like a film score by the timbrally-inventive Jerry Goldsmith, sometimes more like the martial War Symphonies of Shostakovich (Bohinj is a gorgeous Slovenian lake which is also the site of a major First World War graveyard). But as with Kernis, Vine, Liebermann, or any other major neoromatic, she writes lots of sui generis music that sounds like no one else (okay, in the vocal central movement there's a lot of Mahler). Her 2013 Violin Concerto #2 "In Breath of Time", half the length of the symphony, doesn't spend time on virtuosity; it's much more of a tone poem (it's built out of an earlier ballet), with a lot of evocative slow passages over which which the soloist sings long legato lines, and a fast middle movement built around a sharp-edged, seesawing idee fixe. Yury Revich is the violinist in the concerto, Anne Schwanewilms the soprano in the symphony. Ariane Matiakh conducts the German State Philharmonic Rheinland-Pfalz. Recommended!

___________________________

From the Records International review:

Doderer's symphony is a magnificent Romantic work on an epic scale. The title refers to a lake in Slovenia set in a landscape of imposing natural beauty. 

However, this beautiful place was also the location of the Isonzo Front during the First World War, and the composer incorporated her impressions of this 

tragic waste of life as commemorated in a war cemetery in the forest on the shores of the lake into the work. The huge first movement clearly depicts the mountains, forests and lake in music of well-nigh Mahlerian grandeur and scale. 

A martial motif invades the proceedings, however, and the music takes on a menacing, military aspect full of raw energy; the sort of thing Shostakovich did 

so well. These elements uneasily confront each other and the movement climaxes in a powerful quasi-chorale underpinned by propulsive ostinati texture 

reminiscent of Sallinen or Panufnik. The central movement returns to the Mahlerian mood; a specially written text inspired by inscriptions from the 

cemetery is sung over an exquisitely sad and atmospheric accompaniment. The heroic finale strives for resolution, its epic scope and scale encompassing 

reminiscences of Bruckner, Strauss, Mahler and at one point, unmistakably, Beethoven, rising to a grand peroration that confronts the future with hard-won 

hope. The concerto is a three-movement virtuoso vehicle dramatically condensed from an earlier dance piece with solo violin. The music ranges from impetuous to 

elegiacally lyrical, and the sense of a narrative thread is present in the succession of moods and dramatic episodes in a very tonal, instantly communicative idiom.