Hans Rott Returns to Cincinnati

Hans Rott

What a delicious irony music director Paavo Järvi has built into this weekend's Cincinnati Symphony concerts at Music Hall.

Paired with Brahms' Violin Concerto is the 1880 Symphony in E Major by Austrian composer Hans Rott.  It was Brahms (allegedly) who drove Rott out of his mind by criticizing the work.

One of the great "what ifs" of music history, Rott died in 1884 of tuberculosis after having been confined to a mental institution.  He was 25. The young man's breakdown occurred on a train in 1880, when he drew a pistol on a fellow passenger who had just lit a cigar -- not because Rott was against smoking, but Brahms, he said, had filled the train with dynamite.  Rott had shown his fledgling symphony to the great man, hoping to win his approval but had received just the opposite, along with the advice that he should give up composition because he lacked talent.  (Rott was a student of Brahms' rival Anton Bruckner at the Vienna Conservatory.)

Janine Jansen

The concert, which features violinist Janine Jansen in the Brahms Concerto, is at 8 p.m. tonight and Saturday (Feb. 19 and 20) at Music Hall.

The importance of Hans Rott becomes apparent from the first bars of his Symphony in E Major.  You think you are hearing a lost symphony by Gustav Mahler.  The resemblance is clear, even blatant (see how many "quotes" you can find).  Mahler knew Rott -- they were fellow students at the Vienna Conservatory -- and greatly admired his work, which he praised openly and effusively.  There are resemblances to Bruckner and Wagner in the Symphony, but, content aside, its spirit and structural freedom -- a new direction for the genre -- point directly to Mahler.

Cincinnati, specifically the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, played a key role in bringing Rott's Symphony in E Major to light after a century lying dormant in the Austrian National Library.

Gerhard Samuel, distinguished former conductor of the CCM Philharmonia Orchestra, working with the edition by British musicologist Paul Banks, led the world premiere of the Symphony at the International Mahler Festival in Paris in 1989.  Samuel and the Philharmonia made the world premiere recording in London afterward for Hyperion Records.  (Look for it at www.amazon.com and other online sources.)

CCM graduate Thomas Consolo, violinist and associate conductor of the Kentucky Symphony Orchestra, was a member of the Philharmonia Orchestra at the time and has written of the experience in depth.  (See in Features on this site.)

Conductor/composer Samuel, a student of Serge Koussevitsky and Paul Hindemith, built CCM's Philharmonia Orchestra into one of the finest conservatory orchestras in the country, taking it to Carnegie Hall in 1987 and making several other path-breaking recordings, including a realization of Charles Ives' unfinished "Universe" Symphony.   He died in Seattle in 2008.

Tickets for the concert are $10-$95, available by calling (513) 381-3300, or order online at www.cincinnatisymphony.org

Roberto Diaz

Mischa Santora

Also this weekend, the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra led by music director Mischa Santora, performs with violist Roberto Diaz in the Monologue for Viola and Strings by Alfred Schnittke and Andante Cantabile for Viola and Strings, Op. 11, by Tchaikovsky.  Also on the program are Prokofiev's  Andante for String Orchestra, Op. 50, and Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48.

Diaz, former principal violist of the Philadelphia Orchestra is president of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

The concert is at 2 p.m. Sunday in Memorial Hall,  Elm St. next door to Music Hall in Over-the-Rhine.  Tickets are $15 and $25, $10 for students, $5 for children (one child's ticket is free with a ticketed adult).  Call (513) 723-1182 or order at www.ccocincinnati.org