Weigl: Symphony No. 6 / Old Vienna

In 2002 we released the first recording of Karl Weigl's (1881-1949) Fifth Symphony, subtitled 'The Apocalyptic' and dedicated it to the memory of Franklin Roosevelt. Completed in the last year of the Second World War, it is a programmatic work describing the world hovering on the brink of total destruction - a very natural way of seeing things for an Austrian refugee of Jewish decent living in the US during that troubled time. But there was more than the destiny of his beloved Vienna that occupied Weigl. He was very much part of an old central-European tradition, the tradition of Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler, which - as he must have realized - was threatened by whatever the outcome of the war. Described by his fellow student Schoenberg as 'one of the best composers of the old school, one of those who continued the glittering Viennese tradition', Weigl in one of the first works written after his flight to the US in 1938, celebrates one aspect of his native city: the waltzes of the Strau