unheard-of! swiss romanticism

In the spring of 1846, the composer August Walter – the son of a Stuttgart confectioner – was asked if he would like to apply for the post of Music Director in Basel. He replied: “As it happens, I have no desire to bury myself in a Swiss town where […] the cows are driven in from the fields on an evening!” Walter had to take back these bold words not long after, when he rescinded his rejection and accepted the post after all. And Switzerland ultimately seems to have appealed to Walter, because he spent almost all his remaining 50 years in Basel. He played a significant role in establishing a lively music scene in the city, and repeatedly organised performances of the music of his colleagues Hans Huber and Friedrich Hegar. His delight in promoting Swiss Classical and Romantic music is a trait he shares with today’s Swiss Orchestra, whose latest programme “Unheard-of! Swiss Romanticism” opens with Walter’s own, spectacular Concert Overture in D major.

This highly Romantic opening is followed by a Harpsichord Concertino by the Genevan composer Marguerite Roesgen-Champion. She was an absolutely remarkable composer. Quite apart from her ability to assert herself in a field that in the 20th century was still largely dominated by men, she was also one of the driving forces behind the rediscovery of late Baroque music and of the harpsichord as a solo instrument. She published over 300 works and was in demand as a harpsichord virtuoso throughout Europe. Ample proof of her ability is provided by her many recordings for radio stations in Western Switzerland and elsewhere, playing her own works and those of other composers. The solo part in her Concertino will here be played by the gifted Masato Suzuki, a master of the harpsichord.

Our programme closes with the 2nd Symphony of Johannes Brahms – a work that is unusually light and accessible by the composer’s own standards. He wrote it in the space of just a few months in the late summer of 1877. After spending 14, immensely exhausting years writing his First Symphony, composing his Second must have seemed soothingly therapeutic to him. And we can hear this in the music itself, which exudes warmth and a closeness to Nature, and (again, unlike much of Brahms) bubbles over with a sense of joie de vivre.