Woyrsch: Symphonies Nos. 4 & 5

Album review

Felix Woyrsch was born in 1860, around the same time as Richard Strauss and Debussy, and died in 1944, one year before Bartók. Until the start of the Great War he remained reasonably modernist, but after 1920 his style, which was firmly rooted in German post-Romanticism, was hard-pressed by the revolutions of Stravinsky, Schönberg, Hindemith, and even Strauss: although more conservative, he professed his admiration for his illustrious contemporaries. In his own words, he learned counterpoint from Palestrina, Gabrieli and Bach, composition from Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn and then later with Brahms and Wagner, and orchestration from Berlioz. This self-proclaimed pedigree didn’t lack panache! The Fourth and Fifth Symphonies date respectively from 1931 and 1935, the dawn of Woyrsch's life, but there is not the slightest trace of pessimism in any of this music and in fact, in spite of itself, it offers a strong dose of modernism stripped of all its romanticism. With these two very mature works discover a composer who defies classification. © SM/Qobuz