Album

Karl Amadeus Hartmann: 6. Symphonie für grosses Orchester (1953) is a volume in Deutsche Grammophon's Musik...Sprache der Welt series. It features legendary Hungarian conductor Ferenc Fricsay and the RIAS-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin in German "new music" of the immediate postwar period, music that would be marginalized with the rise of the Darmstadt Festival and its emphasis on "international serialism" in the later 1950s. What Karl Amadeus Hartmann: 6. Symphonie für grosses Orchester (1953) makes clear is that Germany sacrificed some of her own musical identity in the process of fostering the unification of both domestic and foreign composers under the banner of serialism.

Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Symphony No. 6 is regarded as the greatest of his nine, and the first movement speaks volumes about the plight of ordinary German citizens of the early '50s. Reviled by the world, consumed by hatred of Hitler, and coming to the overwhelming realization of having committed, and lost, the better part of a generation of soldiers to cause what was, in the end, both unconscionable and doomed, Hartmann grieves for the fatherland. The second movement is a wild, extroverted frenzy of fugal constructs that builds into an enormous climax of riotous orchestral color, as though Hartmann is looking forward to Germany's re-entry onto the world's stage through her technological acumen, discipline, and strength of spirit.

There are a couple of single movements from other symphonies included here, the Finale from Hartmann's Symphony No. 4 and a Finale from Wolfgang Fortner's sole symphony of 1947. Some might scoff that offering only single movements of a symphony is a rip-off. However, in the early '50s it was common for European record companies to offer only a single movement out of a little-known, new, and untried symphony. The disc is filled out with Boris Blacher's Orchestervariationen über ein Thema von Nicolò Paganini, Op. 26, the most approachable of the works here, as it retains something of the German style associated with the Weimar Republic, and composers such as Kurt Weill.

Ferenc Fricsay's handling of all this literature is uncannily crisp, particularly in the articulation of wind and brass choirs, and is delivered as a carefully controlled cocktail of searing sensitivity and volatile power. The monophonic recording quality is variable, ranging from excellent in the Hartmann Sixth to cramped and somewhat shrill in the Blacher.

© Uncle Dave Lewis, All Music Guide

CD 1
Karl Amadeus Hartmann Composer Symphony No.6 Work Recorded 1955 22:58 Ferenc Fricsay Conductor, RIAS Symphonie-Orchester Orchestra
1	1.Adagio	11:14			$1.99
2	2.Toccata variata. Presto - Allegro assai	11:44			$1.99
Karl Amadeus Hartmann Composer Symphony No.4 for string orchestra Work Recorded 1949 Ferenc Fricsay Conductor, RIAS Symphonie-Orchester Orchestra
3	3.Finale: Adagio appassionato	7:04			$1.49
Wolfgang Fortner Composer Symphony Work Recorded 1949 Ferenc Fricsay Conductor, RIAS Symphonie-Orchester Orchestra
4	4.Finale	7:20			$1.49
Boris Blacher Composer Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Op.26 Work Recorded 1950 14:00 Ferenc Fricsay Conductor, RIAS Symphonie-Orchester Orchestra
5	1.Thema. Quasi Presto. Variationen 1-3	2:08			$0.99
6	2.Variationen 4-7	2:03			$0.99
7	3.Variation 8	2:17			$0.99
8	4.Variation 9-12	3:03			$0.99
9	5.Variation 13-16	4:29			$0.99