WILHELM PETERSEN (1890–1957) : Symphony No.3 in C# minor. Radio-Sinfonie-Orchester Frankfurt cond. Constantin Trinks. World premiere recording.

Description: Petersen is another example of a first-rate symphonist of the 20th century who has largely fallen through the cracks of music history because of his reluctance to embrace modernism. The story is not an unfamiliar one; a prodigious early talent, he went on to study with majorfigures of the time - composition with Friedrich Klose and conducting with Felix Mottl, and embarked on his early symphonic works. He enjoyed considerable early success as a composer, but a combination of ill health, lack of resources, and inexperience led to an inability to capitalise on these, for example by seeking publication which would have led to more performance opportunities. After a flirtation with a more dissonant, "modern" idiom in the early 1920s, after undergoing what he described as a "creative reorientation”, he embraced the more conventionally tonal and formally structured style which he followed for the rest of his life. He continued to compose fairly prolifically, and a good proportion of his works were performed - though not with any regularity - and garnered praise from significant figures including Bruno Walter. To Petersen, Bruckner was the ne plus ultra of symphonic writing, though at least in the 3rd Symphony this influence is felt more in terms of scale, form, and ambition than thematically. The Third Symphony, receiving its premiere recording here, is an hour-long three-movement Romantic work of considerable substance. The large first movement (25 minutes) is in sonata form, with a strikingly dramatic first subject and a songful second. The emergence of the development section, with its rigorous, muscular counterpoint, strongly suggests the influence of Bruckner (as inculcated, no doubt, by his more academic disciple, Klose). Virtually every appearance of every theme in the symphony - and the majority of Petersen's other mature works, for that matter - is richly embellished with contrapuntal elaboration. After the turbulence and tragic climaxes of the development, the two themes re-emerge triumphantly writ large in the final peroration of the recapitulation, followed by a transcendently reflective coda. The central Andante is relaxed and flowing, and the finale, still formally rigorous and contrapuntally intricate, brings the symphony to an energetic and high-spirited conclusion.