Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien - Marx: Eine Frühlingsmusik, Idylle & Feste im Herbst (2008)

Joseph Marx was and is a unique one-man occurrence in Austrian music history, a composer of lavishly, sumptuously, and opulently set orchestral music as well as of tender piano songs with an impressionistic touch. His principal strengths lay in both genres; he was a declared lyricist who was not drawn very much to the dramatic mode – a diagnosis corroborated by the fact that he did not compose a single opera. Marx spent his youth in the southern Styrian natural landscape and – as the grandson of an Italian grandmother – on romantic country estates in Italy. Nature and its seasonal cycle continued to be his greatest source of inspiration throughout his life. The titles chosen by him – Autumn Chorus to Pan, Autumn Symphony, A Spring Music, Idyll, Feasts in Autumn – make this very clear. We are presenting the long-overdue recording premiere of the last title and on this occasion can only second the very fitting words pronounced by the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung after its very first performance in 1922: “There is a genuine passion of experiencing in this music, a self-intoxication with atmospheric moods, lyrical lavishing in feelings, memory pictures, natural impressions.”