Don Satz responded to my reply to him:

>Richard also mentioned that the conductor on the Joachim ovetures disc,
>Roland Bader, also conducted Nicolai's Te Deum on cd.  I have a Nicolai
>symphony on MD&G.  Is the Te Deum comparable in quality?

I think it's a better work and Don's question prompted a little research
which unearthed a few possibly related facts.  To me, the writing in the Te
Deum sounds much more confident and assured, so I was surprised to discover
that not only were the symphony and the Te Deum written in the same year
(1831), but Nicolai was only 21 when he wrote them.  To complicate matters,
I'm not familiar with the CD to which Don refers.  There are two symphonies
and the one I'm using as a comparison is the second in D, which I have on
a Virgin CD (nla?) conducted by Karl Anton Rickenbacher with the Bamberg
Symphony, which may be the same performance as the one Don has.  I don't
know that the C Minor symphony has ever been recorded.  Whatever, as does
the symphony in D, the Te Deum, which runs about 42', sounds like a very
pleasant mixture of Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann, and I particularly
like the brass writing.  The fillers on Bader's Koch CD, a couple of a
capella motets, are OK, but this is not a form of music I respond to much
anyway and Don may find them more to his liking than I do.  The DG version
I referred to in my earlier post was conducted by one Mathieu Lange with
the Berlin Radio SO and released in the late 60s - Evelyn Lear was one of
the soloists.  I thought it might have turned up on Galleria, but this now
seems most unlikely so, AFAIK, Bader is the only option.

BTW, the CD with the symphony contains four overtures, one of which, the
Christmas Overture, I used once or twice close to that event in the days
when I did a weekly program on our local radio station.  It's the only
overture I know of in which a choir bursts into life in the closing pages,
an aural coup de theatre (there must be a word for it).

Richard Pennycuick
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