The Second Symphony of the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896-1967) is deeply bound up with his personal life. In 1932 his first marriage broke up, and his wife and four children left Solothurn in the north to settle in Ticino, in the south. Through visits to his family in Lugano Flury grew to know the area well, so much so that he decided to celebrate their new surroundings in his Second Symphony, the movements of which are based on the carillon of the Flury family's local church and three Ticino folksongs. Structurally, the work belongs to the Brucknerian tradition, but it also has points of contact with the orchestral nature-painting of Flury's good friend Joseph Marx. The landscape of the Poeme nocturne is an interior one: it is an expansive dream-fantasy of occasionally violent passions, a worthy cousin of Richard Strauss' tone-poems.
