Flury: Orchestral Music Vol. 5

The fifth volume of orchestral works by the late Romantic Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967) contains two works closely associated with his home city of Solothurn in the northwest of the country. His "Fastnachts-Sinfonie" is an expansive symphonic tone poem based on local legends and folk traditions, expressing both exuberance and deeply felt emotion. The Third Symphony—in which traces of Anton Bruckner and Richard Strauss can be detected—celebrates the gentle hills and endless skies of the Bucheggberg, where he loved to walk and where, as the carefree music suggests, his heart found freedom. Paul Mann conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra, famous not least for the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. Paul Mann is a frequent guest conductor for many orchestras in Europe, the USA, Australia, and the Far East. His tenure as Chief Conductor of the Odense Symphony Orchestra in Denmark was accompanied by great success with critics and audiences alike, particularly in the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, Edward Elgar, Gustav Mahler, Robert Schumann, and Dmitri Shostakovich. In recent times, Paul Mann has been crucially involved in the rediscovery of the Swiss composer Richard Flury, recording all the numbered symphonies and other symphonic works, as well as three of the four Flury operas, in part with his own orchestrations of rarities. He also prepared the musical scores, as is often the case in connection with his recordings.