Andermatt Music: The Swiss symphonic treasury

Description

Together with the Swiss Orchestra, mezzo-soprano Marie-Claude Chappuis presents orchestral songs by the Lachen composer Joachim Raff. Also on the program: Mendelssohn, Walter and others. About the program: The relationship between Switzerland and Germany is sometimes somewhat complicated: Sometimes the Swiss refer to their northern neighbor as the "great canton", sometimes they worry about their independence and tend to feel inferior to the Germans. And yet the two nations are linked by a long tradition of cultural exchange. Not only were German poets and artists inspired by the beauty of Switzerland, the paths of composers from both countries also crossed, so that their biographies are sometimes closely interwoven. They now meet again in the concert "Schatzkammer Schweizer Sinfonik". Richard Wagner, who was politically persecuted and lived for a time in exile in Switzerland, and the Lachen composer Joachim Raff knew each other well personally, wrote letters to each other, but at the same time had an ambivalent relationship, especially after the publication of Raff's almost three-hundred-page pamphlet "The Wagner Question", in which he criticized his compositional style as lacking depth: "These melodies float on the surface of [...] harmony, like fat eyes on a watery soup." Although Raff was referring here to Wagner's opera overtures, Raff's criticism can also be applied to the Wesendonck song "Träume", which was composed in exile in Zurich. At the same time, Raff was influenced by Wagner in his compositional style, which makes the juxtaposition of Wagner's work with Raff's orchestral song "Traumkönig und sein Lieb" and the "Zwei Scenen" for mezzo-soprano and orchestra all the more appealing. Felix Mendelssohn - whose overture to the "Fairy Tale of the Beautiful Melusine" is performed - is regarded as one of the young Raff's first patrons, as he published early works by the Swiss composer with the renowned publishing house Breitkopf & Härtel, thus laying the foundation for Raff's career. Mendelssohn, who traveled to Switzerland several times, was, like Wagner, enthusiastic about the Swiss mountains. The German-born composer August Walter, on the other hand, feared the Swiss countryside: "In fact, I would have no desire to bury myself in a Swiss town where [...] the cows would be driven in from the fields in the evening!" But contrary to this assumption, he soon felt at home - and spent most of his life working as a Swiss among Swiss in Basel. Program: Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Overture to "The Fairy Tale of the Beautiful Melusine" op. 32 Joseph Joachim Raff "Two Scenes" op. 199 "Traumkönig und sein Lieb" for voice and orchestra op. 66 Richard Wagner "Dreams" from the Wesendonck-Lieder WWV 91B August Walter Symphony in E flat major op. 9 Marie-Claude Chappuis, mezzo-soprano Sherniyaz Mussakhan, violin Swiss Orchestra Lena-Lisa Wüstendörfer, conductor Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.