In Tuesday’s (9/24) Chicago Tribune, John von Rhein reviews the Northbrook Symphony Orchestra’s Sunday performance at Sheely Center for the Performing Arts in Northbrook, Illinois, of the “once-obscure Symphony in E major” by Hans Rott. Von Rhein describes Rott as “one of the saddest cases of unfulfilled promise in music history”; a onetime protégé of Anton Bruckner, he died in 1884 at age 25 in a mental hospital. “It wasn’t until the 1980s that the manuscript of Rott’s First Symphony was unearthed at the Austrian National Library in Vienna.… Lawrence Rapchak, the Northbrook Symphony’s music director … wasted no time making the work the centerpiece of his enterprising, three-year cycle of forgotten late-Romantic symphonies, ‘In Mahler’s Shadow.’ … The really fascinating thing about the E-major symphony is how much of that work crept into the first three symphonies of Mahler.… Rapchak offered side-by-side musical comparisons in the course of his pre-performance remarks.… The Rott symphony would pose an immense challenge even for the Chicago Symphony, let alone a suburban orchestra of constantly shifting personnel. Despite this, Rapchak did a superb job of sustaining the intensity level for the duration of this demanding score.… Thanks to the Northbrookers, Rott languishes in Mahler’s shadow no longer.”
Posted September 25, 2013
