Swiss-born conductor-composer
Adriano has always championed music
by Late-Romantic composers. Film music
and the music of Ottorino Respighi have
been among his specialities. Now for
this Guild CD, he has turned his attention
again to the music of the relatively
little known Swiss composer, Fritz Brun
who was born in Lucerne and studied
with, amongst others, Willem Mengelberg.
In 1901 he became private "music
maker" and teacher of Prince George
of Prussia who acted as friend and mentor
to the young Swiss musician. He settled
once again in Switzerland in 1903 where
he was to compose all his subsequent
works including, besides ten symphonies,
concertos for piano and cello, settings
of Goethe for choir and orchestra, and
songs.
Brun’s Fifth Symphony
begins in gloom. Double-basses dictate
a dark cavernous atmosphere with low
woodwinds adding desolate voices. Crushing
staccato chords add menace and, at about
5:20, sardonic, derisive figures augment
the movement’s pessimism. Adriano in
his own notes to the symphony refers
to Brun’s modest ‘Brahmsian’ orchestral
strength with percussion reduced to
timpani and the meager addition of just
a double bassoon and a bass tuba. There
is a certain Brahmsian influence too,
to this bleak, tragic movement. The
nightmare continues into the short second
movement, a nocturnal scherzo. This
is however no sylvan pastoral romance
- rather music that is unsettling and
creepy with spectral murmurings and
hammerings. It’s music that one might
associate with a horror film – a sort
of mix of Berlioz and Bernard Herrmann.
The third movement, as revealed to Hermann
Scherchen who conducted one of the first
performances of this symphony, was intended
as a funeral ode to the composer Hermann
Suter. Brun wrote of Suter that he was,
"a strongly profiled man; he loved
animals, nature and solitude; he demanded
much but also gave much, in a reserved,
chaste manner." It is elegiac and
affectionate yet much of this third
movement is devoted to a quite realistic
description of the agony and sufferings,
and the final crisis of the hopelessly
sick man that was Suter, with telling
use of nervous string figurations, tremolandi
and trills. The fourth movement,
with tempo indicated to be ‘fast and
furious’, of this caustic, unsettling
and haunted (perhaps autobiographical?)
symphony, continues the bleak mood of
what has gone before.
Brun’s final Symphony,
No. 10, completed in 1953 when he was
75, is more optimistic. Its influences
were the final lines of the allegorical
poem that had already been set to music
by Hugo Wolf – Mörike’s Im Frühling
(In Springtime); and the view from Brun’s
home across to Lake Lugano. The influence
of Schumann is also discernible. The
joyful freshness of Spring is contrasted
with more turbulent material suggesting
stormier seasons. The second movement,
a somewhat nervous scherzo, begins solemnly
but the music soon turns joyous; with
folk-like material abounding. One is
reminded of Schumann’s ‘Spring’ Symphony
and the lighter touch of Mendelssohn.
The Symphony’s Adagio has a lovely
meditative theme for strings full of
yearning, although occasional shadows
might suggest an odd April shower. The
majestic final Vivace begins
cheerily but the mood darkens and the
music alternates between folkdance-like
material and episodes that suggest a
hostile environment of, as Adriano suggests,
"a climatically more extreme landscape
than that of Southern Switzerland".
Intense and emotional
music – challenging listening for the
adventurous.
Ian Lace
OTHER BRUN REVIEWS ON MWI
Symphony No. 9 Guild GMCD
7306
Symphony No. 3 Sterling CDS-1059-2
Moscow Symphony Orchestra/Adriano 
