Scherchen haydn biography

Scherchen restores the danger to Haydn's music, showing it to possess qualities of urgency, elation, despair and even neurosis that pass beyond Mozart and.
Hermann Scherchen (21 June 1891 – 12 June 1966) was a German conductor, who was principal conductor of the city orchestra of Winterthur from 1922 to 1950.
Largely self-taught as a musician, Hermann Scherchen joined the Blüthner Orchestra as a viola player in 1907, and played with the Berlin Philharmonic.

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This remarkable, disquieting set in DG’s Original Masters series contains the series of Haydn symphonies that Hermann Scherchen recorded for the Westminster label in Vienna between 1950 and 1958. Their existence may come to many as a something of a surprise. Scherchen is so closely associated in the public imagination with the 20th-century avant-garde, that the realisation that a considerable part of his discography consists of 18th-century music inevitably causes something akin to dismay.

We think of him primarily as one of the great champions of Mahler, the conductor of early performances of “Pierrot Lunaire”, who went on to put “Moses und Aron” on the map in the years following Schoenberg’s death. This was also the man who founded the left-wing contemporary music journal “Melos” in the wake of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and years later set up the “Centre for Electro-Acoustic Research” at Gravesano in Switzerland.

Haydn initially seems to sit uneasily with such a biography, rooted, as it is, in radica

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Hermann Scherchen

German conductor (1891-1966)

Hermann Scherchen

Born	(1891-06-21)21 June 1891 Berlin
Died	12 June 1966(1966-06-12) (aged 74) Florence
Occupation

Hermann Scherchen (21 June 1891 – 12 June 1966) was a German conductor, who was principal conductor of the city orchestra of Winterthur from 1922 to 1950. He promoted contemporary music, beginning with Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, followed by works by Richard Strauss, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Edgard Varèse, later Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono and Leon Schidlowsky. He usually conducted without using a baton.

Life

Scherchen was born in Berlin. Originally a violist, he played among the violas of the Bluthner Orchestra of Berlin while still in his teens. He conducted in Riga from 1914 to 1916 and in Königsberg from 1928 to 1933, after which he left Germany in protest of the new Nazi regime and worked in Switzerland. Along with the philanthropist Werner Reinhart, Scherchen played a leading role in shaping the musical life of Winterthur for many years, with numerous premiere pe