I second the recommendation of the Koch CD.  To clear up some possible
quasi-misconceptions:  there are and there aren't symphonies, as such, by
Ullmann.  Notations on his 5th and 7th piano sonatas led a musicologist, so
far as I know, to the belief that Ullmann intended them to be orchestrated,
and so far as I am concerned the proof of such puddings is in the eating;
they have both been performed and broadcast and the 2nd of them (sym.  2,
from son.  7) is on a Bayer CD (set?) that also includes the piano concerto
and a reconstruction of the orchestral version of the (lost) piano work
that established Ullmann's popularity, variations on a short piano work by
Schoenberg (that's not the exact title, I'm going by very poor memory here
alas.  I .did.  hear this work on the radio a few weeks ago and thought it
very good- tasty pudding so to speak- and a live performance of the piano
concerto, different I think from that on the CD, revealed a fine work with
unexpected-to-me occasional similarities to Samuel Barber's.)

I have heard very little by Viktor Ullmann that I did not think very well
of.  All 7 piano sonatas are quite fine, for instance, as is the famous
"Atlantis" opera (I haven't heard the Sturz des(?) Antichrist opera on
cpo).  There's only one surviving string quartet, the 3rd; the first two
are to my knowledge lost.  (It, too, is very much worth hearing, and I'm
glad to see all the notices of performances it's been receiving all
around the US in the last few years.) As to his being the best of the
Terezin-interned composers, well, he was the best of a good lot; Klein and
Haas, for instance, were no pushovers either (Klein's string trio is a
masterpiece, I think).  (Yes, I'm deliberately playing on the expression
"best of a bad lot", why do you ask?)

Thankfully the presence of sites that provide audio samples of CDs of these
composers' music makes the job of describing their styles somewhat easier,
at least potentially and sometimes, though of course 1-minute snatches are
at best misleading (and one should always listen to them, hence, with that
in mind) and not everyone has a machine equipped to listen to them, either.
Anyhow, while I wouldn't mind a bit if Naxos stepped into the fray, the
series that Koch began (that was supposed to run 9 volumes, I thought? but
has run only 4 I think, not sure) has produced some very fine performances
(the Ullmann disk is first-rank imho), and along with the "Silenced Voices"
series on Northeastern is a good place to start.  The "Entartete Musik"
series on Decca- well, concept .is. gimmicky but has produced some very
good performances and recordings as well (notably in my opinion of Krenek
sym.  2- critically panned CD, I know, but wonderful in my book, and not
germane to this discussion either, I also know, since Krenek died in 1991
IIRC.)

Eric Schissel
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