The Austrian composer Walter Bricht (1904-70) was one of many musicians of Jewish ancestry who fled Vienna after the Anschluss for the safety of the USA; Bricht became a valued professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. Fittingly, it is the nearby Fort Wayne Philharmonic, in its own debut recording, that has made the first album of Bricht’s music. The recording reveals another major Viennese voice and points to yet another potentially important career cut off in the bud by the Nazis. Bricht was reportedly Franz Schmidt’s favorite student, and the late-Romantic styles of the two men are indeed very closely aligned in their mix of Baroque counterpoint, Classical form and Wagnerian chromatic harmony: Bricht’s Symphony in A minor might almost be Schmidt’s No. 5.
