Kevin Sutton:

>So much of what spewed out of the record companies at the height of the
>cd newness craze was pretty lame.  Even the famed Heinichen Concerti that
>were such a big deal on the scene a few years ago are now lying in
>multiple copies in the remainder bins.  Great music like Bach will
>survive.  It may fall into occasional disuse, but it is of sufficient
>artistic merit to come back and hold its own.  I don't think that you can
>say this of Salieri, Thalberg, MacDowell, Kuhlau and many others of the
>second string ilk.  (Now I await the tirades from fans of the above
>mentioned.)

Just for the hell of it, I jotted down a random selection of music I've
bought this year.  All of it was new to me and I was buying because the
music promised to be at least interesting.  So we have the Heinichen
concerti Kevin mentioned, three wind partitas by Krommer, Hamerik
symphonies, Shapero's Symphony for Classical Orchestra, Piston violin
concertos, Ries symphonies, Dohnanyi violin concerto, Gernsheim symphonies,
assorted Michael Haydn orchestral music.  None of these works is well-known
and in most cases, they were being recorded for the first time.  In the
general scheme of things, none of the composers would be regarded as a
great composer but in the individual's frame of reference, things may well
be different.  I don't regret buying any of these CDs and I think all of
them are music that is well-crafted, enjoyable and, most importantly,
worthy of many hearings.  Perhaps each of the composers would be "second
string ilk" but their music still deserves to be heard.

I delight in discovering new works, eg after years of believing that
Reicha's Symphony in E Flat was his sole effort in that form, I discovered
there are more symphonies, recorded and available.  A year ago I'd never
heard of Hamerik or Gernsheim, and their music has filled in another couple
of corners of the musical jigsaw for me.  You have only to grab a volume of
Grove and quietly salivate at all the composers who are just names and work
lists and interesting lives - their music might not be worth the trouble,
but it just might be.  A case in point is Marek whose cause has been taken
up by conductor Gary Brain and Koch.  I venture to suggest Marek's Sinfonia
is one of the great works of the century, but it could very easily have
remained unknown except to the musicologist.

And inevitably, we come down to X is a great composer, Y is almost great,
Z is a one-work hack and so on.  We all have our favourites, our composers
we avoid (Puccini and most of Reger for me), even whole aspects of music
that do nothing for us (with few exceptions, organ music).  In the end, it
probably doesn't matter who are great.  But I've recently bought Rosalyn
Tureck's Great Pianists set of the Goldberg Variations - she, the composer,
the music and the performance are *all* great!  I'm off to hear them again.

Richard Pennycuick
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