Joachim Raff, German/Swiss Romantic composer

[demzilla]

I thought I'd share a discovery I've recently made: the music of Joachim Raff, who in his heyday was as popular as contemporaries Wagner and Brahms (Raff lived from 1822 - 1882). Being eclectic in style, and not fitting in with the competing schools of Wagner and Brahms, his music eventually faded from the scene.

There is now a Raff mini-revival, and for good reason. Raff was a master orchestrator, with a gift for beautiful melodies, and an extensive output that deserves to be heard -- 11 symphonies, a piano concerto, 2 cello concerti, 2 violin concerti, numerous chamber pieces. If you enjoy music of the Romantic era, consider giving Raff a try. Once you get to know it, his music is uniquely his, but you may detect hints of Mendelssohn and Liszt, even a Germanic Dvorak or Tchaikovsky (actually, the Russian composer borrowed ideas from Raff, of whom he was fond.)

Good places to start would be his Symphonies No. 3 ("Im Walde") and 5 ("Lenore.") The Lenore is probably his most famous work, revived in the 1970s by Bernard Hermann, the movie composer, who was fond of Raff. The Piano Concerto is another one of those works that, once you hear it, causes you to say: Why isn't this played in concert halls once in a while?

For more about Raff, there is an excellent website, www.raff.org. It's one of the best composer sites on the web. You can hear clips of the music there; the forums, dedicated to Raff and other unsung composers, are also entertaining and valuable for anyone interested in branching out a bit. (There's a lot of marvelous classical music that never gets a hearing because major CD companies and orchestras remain fixated on popular pieces and "names" that bring in the most money. But I would challenge anyone, after hearing the Raff Piano Concerto, to tell me that it is not every bit as good as the Grieg, or any by Saint-Seans or Liszt.)