The Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896-1967) completed the last of his five symphonies in 1956, when it's unashamedly melodic and tonal style-with elements absorbed from Bruckner, Richard Strauss, Joseph Marx and other such late Romantics-made it a conscious rebellion against the modernist trends of the time. Flury, moreover, was an instinctive nature-painter, and the Swiss landscape that meant so much to him can be sensed almost as readily in supposedly abstract works such as this symphony as in those-often quasi-symphonic, like the suite also heard here-that pay explicit homage to the woods and valleys in which he grew up.
