Braunfels: Organ Concerto; Symphonic Variations etc – review

3 / 5 stars
Apkalna/Albrecht/Tolzer Knabenchor/Munich SO/Albrecht

Walter Braunfels' music was popular in Germany in the 1920s and early 30s, and he played an important part in the reconstruction of German musical education after the second world war. But his works are little heard now, apart from his fine Aristophanes-based opera The Birds. Recordings have been sporadic too, and the latest brings together an organ concerto, a substantial solo-organ work and a much earlier set of orchestral variations, all recorded for the first time. Decently rather than outstandingly played, it's an odd assortment, which nevertheless fixes Braunfels' music within the spectrum of 20th-century German music rather well. He was born in 1882 and lived to 1954, but his outlook remained staunchly late Romantic, though in both the Organ Concerto of 1927, an almost perversely unflamboyant work which introduces chorales sung by a children's choir at the end of its second and third movements, and the F minor Toccata, Adagio and Fugue completed in 1942, that Romanticism is heavily tinged with Reger-style chromaticism, and has little of the lushness of his 1909 set of variations on a French children's song.