Rescued from oblivion before his tragic death in Auschwitz in 1944, Marcel Tyberg' Symphony No. 3 sets out on a poetic journey with shades of Schumann and Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler.
No, you probably haven't heard of Marcel Tyberg, and before this CD landed in the in-box, I hadn't either. He was an Austrian composer (1893-1944) who, listed as one-sixteenth Jewish, was a victim of the Nazis' "final solution." Just before he was shipped off, he gave his scores to an Italian physician for safekeeping.
They were passed on to the physician's son, also a physician, who settled in Buffalo, N.Y. After vainly trying to get numerous musicians interested in the works, Dr. Enrico Mihich finally succeeded with the Buffalo Philharmonic's music director, JoAnn Falletta. In 2008, more than 60 years after Tyberg's Third Symphony was composed during World War II, Falletta conducted its world premiere.
If you know your Mahler and Bruckner, prepare for a number of double takes. The opening tenor horn solo is a gesture right out of Mahler's Seventh Symphony; it's expanded in a musical language right out of Bruckner. So the symphony goes, alternating echoes, if never quotations, from those two composers. The slow movement, though, nudges closer to movie music - not a bad thing, but something of a surprise in context.
If this is retro fare for the 1940s, the 1936 Piano Trio looks further back. Imagine Mendelssohn and Schumann updated for an early 20th-century palm court, something a young Erich Wolfgang Korngold might've done. (Tyberg also composed dance music as Till Bergmar.)
If originality is the criterion for greatness, Tyberg was at best a second-rate composer. But his pastiches are appealing and well crafted, and they get skilled and sensitive performances here, admirably recorded. -- The Dallas Morning News, Scott Cantrell, September 26, 2010