Jadassohn: Symphonies 1 - 4

Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt, Griffiths, Howard, Jadassohn, Salomon

CPO 777607

Although Salomon Jadassohn continued to be known to generations of music students from his writings on music theory, above all from his Lehrbuch der Harmonie issued in twenty-one printings after its publication in 1883, he unfortunately was quickly forgotten as a composer soon after his death. Next to Carl Reinecke, however, Jadassohn was regarded as the leading composer of the so-called Leipzig School, whose members continued on the path of musical romanticism on which Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann had set out and were important influences in Leipzig’s music world for four decades. Jadassohn studied with teachers such as Franz Liszt and was later an instructor in music theory, piano, and composition at the Leipzig Conservatory and enjoyed an outstanding reputation as an educator in the field of music. His pupils included many composers represented on cpo – such as Frederick Delius, Edvard Grieg, Ferruccio Busoni, Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek, Felix Weingartner, and Sigfrid Karg-Elert. In Jadassohn’s extensive and multifaceted oeuvre, including all the musical genres except the opera, his four symphonies composed during the twenty-eight-year period from 1860 to 1888 occupy an important place though not a central one. His understanding of music tended toward the academic and craftsmanly (in the best sense of the term), which meant that he also viewed the symphonic genre as the expression and interplay of »forms moved in sounding.«

CD x 2

CPO

2/24/15

761203760725