Hermann Scherchen
Scherchen was one of the leading conductors in the middle part of the 20th Century, especially valued for his pioneering performances of the contemporary music of his time.
He was essentially self-taught as a musician, and became a violist in the Blüthner Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic when he was sixteen. In 1911 he was an assistant to Arnold Schoenberg in the preparation of Pierrot Lunaire for performance. Following its Berlin premiere, the piece was taken on a tour in which Scherchen conducted. He became the conductor of the Riga Symphony Orchestra in 1914, but was soon interred by the Russians as an enemy alien when World War I started. He returned to Germany after Russia left the war to found the Neue Musikgesellschaft, and the Scherchen Quartet. In 1919 he founded a militant magazine Melos.
He succeeded Furtwängler as the director of the Frankfurt Museum Concerts in 1922 and in the same year began a long relationship wit the Winterthur Musikollegium in Switzerland. From 1928 to 1933 he was the Generalmusikdirektor in Königsberg. He frequently conducted contemporary music festivals, especially with the International Society for Contemporary Music, with which he was connected from its founding in 1923. Among his premieres in the 1920s and '30s were the s Three Fragments from Wozzeck by Berg and the quarter-tone opera Mother by Alois Haba.
He left Germany immediately upon the accession of the Nazis to power in 1933, settling in Switzerland, where he became Music Director of the Zurich Radio Orchestra, and also gave courses in conducting, which became a regular summer school in Switzerland in 1939. In the same year he founded the Ars Viva Orchestra. He married the Chinese composer Hsia Shu-sien. They had a daughter, Tona Scherchen (or Tona Scherchen-Hsiao), born in 1937, who went back to China with her mother in 1949. She became a noted composer, especially after she moved to France in 1972.
Scherchen resumed his continent-wide activities after World War II ended. He was director of the Zürich Radio orchestra (1944-1950), and in 1950, with the support of UNESCO, opened a studio for electro-acoustical research in 1954 in Gravesano, the village where he lived. He continues his writing about new music in the Gravesano Blätter. Unlike many conductors of his generation his "new music" was not merely the new music of his youth, but the continuing evolution of new music. In the 1950s he conducted the premieres of such works as Dallapiccola's Il Prigionero, Dessau's Das Verhör des Lukullus, and Henze's König Hirsch. He was the first to play any music from Schoenberg's Aron und Moses in Darmstadt (1951), edited it for its first performance under his colleague Hans Rosbaud, and led its first performance in Berlin. He did not appear in the United States until 1964 when he conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra.
He was the author of a leading text on conducting, and of many articles supporting modern music. He suffered a heart attack while conducting Malipiero's Orfeide in Florence and died four days later.
© Joseph Stevenson /TiVo
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Scherchen Conducts Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and Others
Symphonic Music - Released by Urania on 8 Feb 2010
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Handel: Water Music / Torelli, Vivaldi: Trumpet Concertos
Roger Delmotte, Arthur Haneuse, Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Westminster on 1 Jan 1961
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
BERG: LULU SUITE "SYMPHONISCHE STÜCKE AUS DER OPER LULU", DER WEIN "KONZERTARIE", LYRIC SUITE "LYRISCHE SUITE"
Classical - Released by Nar Classical on 10 Jul 2023
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Weber: Grandes ouvertures
Hermann Scherchen, Karl Ristenpart, Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Paris, Chambre de la Sarre
Classical - Released by Universal Music Division Decca Records France on 1 Jan 2006
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 6
Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Deutsche Grammophon (DG) on 24 Apr 2020
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Beethoven: Overtures II
Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper, English Baroque Orchestra, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Deutsche Grammophon (DG) on 24 Apr 2020
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Beethoven: Symphonies No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36; No. 4 in B-Flat Major, Op. 60 & No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Deutsche Grammophon (DG) on 1 Jan 2014
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Beethoven: Symphony No. 7 & Wellington's Victory
Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Deutsche Grammophon (DG) on 24 Apr 2020
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Johann Sebastian Bach : Kantaten BWV 84, 106 & 140 (Cantatas Recording 1950-1951)
Classical - Released by OperaPrima-Carillon on 1 Jan 2004
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Mahler: Symphony No. 7 in E Minor
Wiener Symphoniker, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Orfeo on 1 Jan 2016
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Bach: Mass in B minor
Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Westminster on 1 Jan 1960
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Mahler: Symphony Nos.1 & 10: Adagio
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Westminster on 1 Jan 2001
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Fritz, C.P.E. Bach & Others: Orchestral Works
Hermann Scherchen, Stadtorchester Winterthur
Classical - Released by Archiphon on 3 Sep 2021
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Schubert: Symphonie No. 8 "Inachevée" (Mono Version)
Hermann Scherchen, Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie
Miscellaneous - Released by BNF Collection on 1 Jan 1960
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Parole e testi
Heidelberg Schola, Ensemble Aisthesis, Orchester des Württembergischen Landes-Theaters, Walter Nußbaum, Hermann Scherchen
Chamber Music - Released by Divox on 3 Apr 2020
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Mahler: Symphony No.5
Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Westminster on 1 Jan 1952
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Georg Friedrich Handel: Messiah
Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Vienna Academy Chorus, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Maison Blanche on 10 Dec 2023
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
LP Pure, Vol. 2: Scherchen Conducts Music for Multiple Orchestras
Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Archiphon on 2 Oct 2012
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Mahler: Symphony No. 3 in D Minor
Hermann Scherchen, Wiener Symphoniker, Hilde Rössel-Majdan, Wiener Sängerknaben
Classical - Released by JPK Musik on 8 Jan 2021
24-Bit 48.0 kHz - Stereo -
Mahler: Symphony No. 2 in C Minor "Resurrection"
Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Hermann Scherchen, Vienna State Opera Choir, Lucretia West, Mimi Coertse
Classical - Released by Andromeda on 11 Dec 2020
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
LP Pure, Vol. 23: Scherchen Conducts Weber Overtures
Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Archiphon on 1 Jan 2016
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo