Like so many important Austrian musicians forced into American exile by the Nazis, Richard Stohr (1874-1967) suddenly found himself cast from celebrity into obscurity, The optimism and energy, even defiance, of these three works from 1942 suggest that he took it on the chin, with his musical language retaining it's Viennese accent in an individual amalgam of Bruckner, Mahler, Schmidt and Korngold. Indeed, the echoes of Mahler in Stohr's Second Symphony may be a deliberate homage if, as seems possible, this 1942 version is a revision of a now-lost work first composed shortly after Mahler's death.
