Music Does Not Disappear. It Waits.

On the BBC Music Magazine Award, three forgotten composers, and why this recording matters

At the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna was the centre of the world. Not merely of music — of thought, of art, of the radical conviction that everything inherited could be questioned, dissolved, and rebuilt. The Vienna Secession, founded in 1897 by Gustav Klimt and a circle of artists who had broken from the conservative Künstlerhaus, gave that conviction a name and an address. Its motto, carved above the entrance to the exhibition building on the Naschmarkt, read: Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit. To every age its art. To art its freedom.

The composers who came of age in that city carried the same impulse into music. Franz Schreker, born in 1878, became one of the most performed opera composers in the German-speaking world. His music was lush, psychologically complex, a late flowering of late Romanticism that already sensed its own mortality. Erich Wolfgang Korngold, born in 1897, was a child prodigy whose gifts stunned Mahler and Puccini alike, and who would later reshape the sound of Hollywood film music in exile. Ernst Krenek, born in 1900 — the year that closes the century and opens the next — was a provocateur, an intellectual, a composer of jazz opera and twelve-tone rigour who refused to stand still.

They were not alone. Hans Gál, Egon Wellesz, Viktor Ullmann, Erwin Schulhoff — an entire generation of composers flourished in the cities of Central Europe, writing music that was performed in the great concert halls, debated in the press, loved and occasionally hated by audiences who took new music seriously. Then came 1933. Then 1938. Then the machinery of National Socialism, which classified this music as entartet — degenerate — and its composers as enemies of the state. Some escaped. Some did not. Viktor Ullmann was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. The music that survived did so in libraries, in private collections, in the memories of those who had heard it and dared not forget.

The idea for this recording began, as many important things do, with a simple question. I had been conducting Korngold’s Sinfonietta in different locations around the world and was struck — not for the first time — by the strangeness of its absence from the standard repertoire worldwide. This was music of extraordinary quality. Music that deserved to be heard not as a curiosity, not as an act of historical rescue, but on its own terms, in a concert hall, by an orchestra that believed in it completely.

To capture the Viennese "Zeitgeist" of the era in the best possible way, we expanded the programme to include Schreker’s Vorspiel zu einem Drama and Krenek’s otpourri, collaborated with BIS Records for a complete Mini-Series, covering also the shadows Paris' Fin-de Sciecle, and released the first on in Oct.2025. What followed was beyond anything I had anticipated. Five stars from BBC Music Magazine. Five stars from Pizzicato. A perfect score across all categories from Crescendo Magazine. A longlisting for the German Record Critics’ Prize. And then, on April 22, 2026, at a ceremony in London: the BBC Music Magazine Award for Best Orchestral Recording of the Year.

I accept this with deep gratitude and with an equally deep sense of responsibility. The award does not belong to me. It belongs, first of all, to Schreker, Korngold and Krenek — to the music itself, which waited nearly a century to be heard like this. It belongs to every musician of the ONPL who brought complete commitment to these scores. And it belongs to Antoine Chéreau and Guillaume Lamas, whose trust and vision made the project possible.

There is a line I keep returning to. Der Zeit ihre Kunst. To every age its art. The Secession believed that each generation must find its own forms, its own truths, its own voice. What the composers of that Viennese world were denied was precisely that — the chance to be heard by their own age, and by ours.

This recording is a small correction to that silence.

Sascha Goetzel, Vienna, April 2026