Rudi Stephan was a promising German composer whose life, like that of George Butterworth, was snuffed out in the heat of battle during "The War to End All Wars." Behind him, Stephan left a tiny output of 33 works, and of these, Music for Orchestra 1912 has proven by far the best known, receiving a decent amount of exposure in the concert halls of German-speaking lands since its 1912 premiere. None of Stephan's music has been recorded with any great frequency, and Chandos' deluxe Super Audio CD Rudi Stephen: Orchestral Works enters the field practically on its own.
Conductor
Oleg Caetani leads the
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the only three orchestral works Stephan has, and one of them, Music for Orchestra 1910, appears on disc for the first time here. In the concerted Music for Violin and Orchestra,
Caetani is joined by violin soloist
Sergei Stadler, and all of the foregoing performers acquit themselves with distinction in this little-known music. Nevertheless, it is the music, and not the performances per se, that grabs one's attention. Stephan's music is firmly post-Romantic in idiom, reminiscent to some extent of late
Mahler or early to middle
Richard Strauss, but only superficially. Stephan favors a painstaking approach toward thematic development, similar to that of
Bruckner, but generally at much slower tempi. Stephan's orchestra is large, but his textures are often thinly scored, and while his music is neither harsh nor modernistic, it is not harmonically conventional, either.
The only reservation that one may have about Rudi Stephen: Orchestral Works is, oddly enough, the sound, which as a Super Audio CD should be state of the art. In this instance though, there are many very quiet passages in this music that fall below the threshold of comfortable listening; crank it up to hear better, and you risk blowing the roof off your home with the arrival of the loud passages on the SACD. Jockeying the volume control is an absolute necessity when listening to this disc. Nonetheless, for those who enjoy great, late-Romantic music like
Mahler, and prefer to sit still and listen when music is playing, Rudi Stephen: Orchestral Works will be both a revelation and a reward, as it is endlessly fresh and thought-provoking music, not to mention fun to spring on one's friends in a game of "name this composer." They won't be able to do it! Unless of course, your friends already have Rudi Stephen: Orchestral Works.