Naxos to Release Second Waghalter CD in April 2015

A second CD featuring orchestral works of Ignatz Waghalter, with conductor Alexander Walker leading the New Russia State Symphony Orchestra, will be released in April 2015.

Featured on the recording are the Overture and Intermezzo from Waghalter’s 1914 comic opera, Mandragola, a 10-movement Suite for Orchestra composed in 1938-39, and a March for Peace composed in 1936.

The first Waghalter CD, released in 2012, marked the rediscovery of a composer of astonishing melodic creativity. The major works featured on the first release — the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1911), Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra (1905), Sonata for Violin and Piano (1902) — were products of the early stage of Waghalter’s career as a composer and increasingly prominent young conductor in Berlin.

The second CD will contribute to a deeper understanding of Waghalter’s development, both as a musician and as an artist engaged with the problems of his times.

While principal conductor at the Deutsches Opernhaus in Berlin between 1912 and 1923, Waghalter composed three operas. Mandragola, premiered in January 1914 at the Deutsche Opernhaus, was warmly received by both the Berlin public and its notoriously exacting critics. The brilliant Overture and delightful Intermezzo found such a favorable response that both were recorded, under Waghalter’s direction, in 1914!  Exactly one century later, Alexander Walker has recovered these long-lost gems of orchestral composition.

Waghalter fled Germany in 1934. His first safe haven was Prague, where he wrote an autobiography and composed several shorter works, including a rousing March for Peace.

From Prague, Waghalter made his way to Vienna and, finally, in late 1937, to New York. Almost immediately, he set to work to create the first classical orchestra of African-American musicians. This extraordinary project, which was undertaken with the support of leading representatives of the Harlem Renaissance, proceeded in the face of immense political, financial and social obstacles. The first public concerts were held in late 1938. In an interview with the famed Afro-American Newspaper of Baltimore, Waghalter placed the work of the orchestra in the context of the great political and moral issues of the times. Music, he stated, was “the strongest citadel of universal democracy,” standing above all distinctions of nationality and ethnicity.

Waghalter explained that he was working on an orchestral composition, which he intended to premiere with the “Negro Orchestra” (as it was then known). However, the orchestra could not be maintained in the face of the harsh objective difficulties, and it dissolved before the work could be performed.

In May 2014, during a visit to Detroit, Alex Walker undertook a painstaking examination of Waghalter manuscripts in the possession of the composer’s grandson, David Green. He found the handwritten manuscript of Waghalter’s orchestral score and, six months later, it was recorded in Moscow.

The Suite was composed nearly 30 years after the Concerto for Violin. The music reflects changes in compositional style, but what persists is the inexhaustible melodic imagination that is the outstanding characteristic of Waghalter´s work.