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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LP Pure, Vol. 21: Scherchen Conducts French Overtures
Orchestre de l'Opera National de Paris, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Archiphon on 4/09/2015
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Hoffmann: Schlage doch, gewünschte Stunde - Bach: Cantates, BWV 54 & 170 (Mono Version)
Hilde Rössel-Majdan, Orchestre de l'opéra d'état de Vienne, Hermann Scherchen
Miscellaneous - Released by BNF Collection on 1/01/1955
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Bartók: Concerto pour piano No. 3, 9 Petites pièces pour piano & 3 Burlesques pour piano (Mono Version)
Edith Farnadi, Hermann Scherchen, Orchestre de l'opéra d'état de Vienne
Miscellaneous - Released by BNF Collection on 1/01/1959
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Rimsky-Korsakov: Sheherazade (Mono Version)
Orchestre de l'opéra d'état de Vienne, Hermann Scherchen
Miscellaneous - Released by BNF Collection on 1/01/1960
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
LP Pure, Vol. 4: Scherchen Conducts Mozart's Requiem
Classical - Released by Archiphon on 26/03/2013
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Mahler: Symphony No. 9 in D Major
Wiener Philharmonic Orchestra, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Orfeo on 1/01/2016
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Liszt: Les préludes, S. 97, Battle of the Huns, S. 105 & 6 Hungarian Rhapsodies, S. 359
Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Urania Records on 4/03/2013
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Bach: The Saint-Matthew Passion
Hermann Scherchen, Orchestre de l'opéra de Vienne
Classical - Released by Tahra on 26/08/2010
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
J.S. Bach: Orchestral Suites Nos. 1-4, BWV 1066-1069 (Remastered 2024)
Hermann Scherchen, English Baroque Orchestra, Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera
Classical - Released by Archipel on 1/03/2024
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Franz Joseph Haydn, Vol. 2
Hermann Scherchen, Wiener Symphoniker
Classical - Released by ArnebAudio on 8/02/2024
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Scherchen: 78 RPM Recordings, Vol. 2 – Zurich
Hermann Scherchen, Studio-Orchester Beromünster
Classical - Released by Archiphon on 22/10/2021
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
LP Pure, Vol. 39: Scherchen Conducts Beethoven (Historical Recording)
Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Archiphon on 18/08/2017
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
LP Pure, Vol. 20: Scherchen Conducts Liszt
Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Archiphon on 3/07/2015
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Berlioz: Grande messe des morts (Mono Version)
Hermann Scherchen, René Alix, Orchestre du Theatre National De L'Opera De Paris
Miscellaneous - Released by BNF Collection on 1/01/1961
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Beethove: Concerto pour piano No. 5 "L'empereur" (Mono Version)
Paul Badura-Skoda, Hermann Scherchen, Orchestre de l'opéra d'état de Vienne
Miscellaneous - Released by BNF Collection on 1/01/1958
24-Bit 96.0 kHz - Stereo -
Reger: Orchestral Works
Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie, Margarethe Bence, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by CPO on 25/01/1995
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Julian Olevsky, Vol. 3: Vivaldi Violin Concertos
Julian Olevsky, Hermann Scherchen, Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper
Classical - Released by DOREMI on 6/01/2004
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Gustav Mahler par Hermann Scherchen (Enregistrement Studio)
Hermann Scherchen, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre de l'opéra d'état de Vienne
Classical - Released by Tahra on 5/04/2011
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Bach: Mass in B Minor
Classical - Released by Tahra on 2/09/2008
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Mozart, Vol. 1: Symphonies Nos. 29, 35 "Haffner" & 36 "Linz" (Remastered 2022)
Wiener Symphoniker, Hermann Scherchen
Classical - Released by Archiphon on 20/01/2023
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo -
Schoenberg: Piano and Violin Concertos
Eduard Steuermann, Rudolf Kolisch, Radio-Sinfonie-Orchester Frankfurt, Hermann Scherchen, Otto Matzerath
Classical - Released by Archiphon on 5/03/2013
16-Bit CD Quality 44.1 kHz - Stereo