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Latest update: 11 November 2011
Tra Nguyen is a name familiar to Raff aficionados for her fine recordings and live performances of his piano compositions. The News Section has a review of a recital which she gave in the English spa town of Cheltenham in October 2011, at which she played the delightful Cinq Eglogues op.105.
Two movements from Raff's String Sextet were played recently at a chamber concert in New Jersey, USA and the News Section now has a review by Warren Cohen of this recital, in which he also compares the Sextets of Brahms and Raff.
Raff's String Quartets Nos.3, 5 and 8 are still not available commercially but each work can now be heard in full here by downloading streaming mp3s of performances by pioneering ensemble Steve's Bedroom Band. The Band's Steve Jones plays all the instruments himself and then, using digital mastering techniques, combines the tracks to produce convincingly full-bloodied and idiomatic performances of these important Raff scores. A new page in the Resources section has all the tracks together with Steve's explanation of his techniques.
Louis Adolphe Coerne was an American composer and academic whose1908 book The Evolution of Modern Orchestration credits Raff with being the founder of the "Classical-Romanticist" school. A new page in the Raff's Life section reprints Coerne's short review of Raff's contribution to the art of orchestration.
Pianist Philip Sear features a number of Raff pieces on his YouTube channel and he has recently added two more idiomatic and charming performances to his collection: An Ihn op.27 no.3 and the Prélude from Raff's piano arrangement of J.S. Bah's Cello Suite No.1. They are to be found on the Raff on YouTube page.
Next update due: The beginning of February 2012.
Previous updates
:8 October 2011
raff.org has published an essential book for anyone interested in Raff: A Catalogue of the Music of Joachim Raff by Mark Thomas is a definitive, painstakingly researched 314-page publication which has extensive entries on every one of Raff's compositions. It incorporates not only the most up to date developments in Raff musicology but also a complete facsimile reprint of the original 1888 catalogue by Arnold Schäfer. Buy it now at the Raff Shop.
Coming soon is another exciting publication for Raff enthusiasts: Alan Howe's English translation of the only biography of Raff ever published, Joachim Raff: Portrait of a Life, by his daughter Helene Raff. The 1925 German original has been updated with copious illustrations and carefully researched footnotes, making it an essential reference work for every musical bookshelf.
The late Dr Alan Krueck's short description of the baroque-inspired Piano Suite No.1 was originally written for a CD booklet and is the latest addition to the Alan Krueck Archive.
The Piano Suite No.3 was the most highly-praised by Raff's contemporaries of his original trio of Suites, which fuse baroque dance forms with romantic melodic and harmony. Dr Alan Krueck's CD booklet notes on the work have been added to the Alan Krueck Archive.
There is welcome news that Vietnamese-British pianist Tra Nguyen is now back in the studio, recording a series of CDs of Raff's solo piano music for a major classical label.
Release is imminent for the long awaited Genesis CD which re-issues Adrian Ruiz's 1971 account on LP of the Piano Suite in D minor and couples it with a completely new performance of the Piano Sonata.
Good quality scans of the title pages of Raff's first two symphonies have been added to the gallery.
Good quality scans of the title pages of two important chamber works, the Sinfonietta and the Two Fantasy Pieces for violin & piano, have been added to the Gallery pages.
27 August 2011
There's exciting news that the major CD label Chandos may be planning a series of CDs featuring Raff's symphonies under the baton of renowned maestro Neeme Järvi.
The late Alan Krueck's writings on Raff's music are being published progressively in the Alan Krueck Archive and the latest addition to his penetrating analyses of the symphonies is his review of the Symphony No.7 In den Alpen. It failed to make a strong impact in Raff's lifetime, but Krueck sees many merits in the work although he regrets that Raff just failed to seize the opportunity to be the first composer to introduce "the apotheosis combination of themes from all the movements" in its finale.
Alan Krueck also wrote descriptions of all seven of Raff's piano suites for the booklets accompanying a series of CDs issued by his AK Coburg label. The Alan Krueck Archive will eventually feature all of these short musical portraits (the first two are below) and this month begins with the Introduction common to all the booklets, in which Krueck summarises Raff's life and career and puts the piano suites in context.
The Piano Suite No.2 is one of the initial trio of baroque-inspired five-movement short suites which Raff wrote in 1857. Some of its movements proved to be amongst the most popular of Raff's piano pieces. Alan Krueck's brief description of the work has been added to the Alan Krueck Archive.
Also added to the Alan Krueck Archive is his rather longer description of the Piano Suite No.5 from 13 years later which, although having only four movements is written on a very much grander scale and contains, in the Folk song with Variations movement, one of Raff's finest creations for the piano.
Raff's Pater Noster for eight part choir is one of a number of religious motets he composed in the late 1860s. Although there is abundant Palestrinan polyphony, it is a richly romantic and quite substantial work. A new entry in the Music in Brief section gives a short description of the piece and is illustrated with a streaming mp3 extract from the work.
Good quality scans of the title pages of two of Raff's early piano pieces have been added to the Gallery pages: the second of the two Liszt Paraphrases op.18 and the Trois pièces caracteristiques op.23.
More title page scans of three piano arrangements of music by J.S. Bach have been added to the Gallery pages: Selected Movements from Bach's Violin Sonatas WoO.23, Bach's Six Cello Sonatas WoO.30 and Three Orchestra Suites by Bach WoO.40.
IMSLP, the site for free downloadable PDF scans of Public Domain scores, has added three new Raff scores to its collection: the Symphony No.1 An das Vaterland, the Sinfonietta for ten wind instruments and the Drei Salonstücke op.56 set of three piano pieces.
The US reprint specialist Edition Silvertrust has produced a new edition of the Piano Quartet No.2.
22 July 2011
The Alan Krueck Archive has been established to preserve the writings on Raff of the pioneering Raff scholar and enthusiast Dr Alan Krueck, who died suddenly in 2010. The latest addition to the Archive is his entertaining and detailed analysis of the Symphony No.8 Frühlingsklänge, which is particularly interesting as Dr Krueck highlights the thematic links between this piece and the other symphonies in the Seasons cycle.
Edward Burlingame Hill was an American composer, teacher and writer on music. In 1901 he wrote a generally approving critique of Raff's Im Walde and Lenore symphonies and 14 years later discussed Raff as a writer of programme music and compared him with his pupil Edward Macdowell. Extracts from both articles are now re-published in a new page in the Life section.
The American critic George Putnam Upton was a Raff enthusiast who wrote approvingly of his music in his highly popular series of music guides for concert goers, such as The Standard Symphonies. The page on Upton and his views on Raff's symphonies had been expanded by inclusion of his wider assessment of Raff's musical achievement, culled from his later book The Standard Musical Biographies.
Raff's religious motets, the Four Marian Antiphons, were written in a spare and ethereally beautiful polyphonic style which appears to have as much in common with the 16th century as the 19th. A brief description of the set has been added to the Music section. It is illustrated with a streaming mp3 performance of one of the motets.
A wealth of Segundo Yogore's excellent MIDI transcriptions has been added to the site. Nineteen piano works comprising fifty individual pieces and two major orchestral works in Raff's own piano reductions have been added to the MIDI pages in the Resource section.
Good quality scans of the title pages of eight Raff scores have been added to the Gallery pages. The title page of the Symphony No.3 Im Walde has been added to the Orchestral Scores page and the title pages of the Octet, Sextet and String Quartets Nos.1-5 have been added to the Chamber Music page.
IMSLP, the site for free downloadable PDF scans of Public Domain scores, has added thirteen new Raff scores to its collection, including two symphonies and several important piano works.
What is probably the first public performance for very many years of the Cello Concerto No.1 took place in Mankato, Minnesota, USA recently. The performance is now available on YouTube and links to each movement have been added to the Raff on YouTube page.