Oskar Böhme Trumpet Concerto & Pieces Matthias Höfs & Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen

The tragic fate of composer Oskar Böhme long went unresearched. His music suffered a similar fate. On his new album “Oskar Böhme – Trumpet Concerto & Pieces” the trumpeter Matthias Höfs is joined by The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen in a performance of his most ambitious works that aims to win a hearing both for his striking and sensitive music and for the story of his life. The album will be released by Berlin Classics on September 30.



The Trumpet Concerto – which is the only Romantic 19th-century concerto for trumpet – is presented here in Matthias Höfs’s own orchestration. It is a challenging work that holds the attention with its dramatic narrative and powerful cadenzas.



The “pieces” on this album display the full stylistic spectrum of Böhme’s oeuvre. “Entsagung” is memorable for its soft tone colours that admirably bring out its restrained sorrow. “Soirée de St. Petersbourg” evokes the image of the city at night with its illuminated palaces and glittering canals. His “Russian Dance” is heard on this album in a version for mixed ensemble. The musical language that pervades this piece illustrates Böhme’s fateful affinity with his adopted homeland. The furious haste of “La Napolitaine, Tarantelle” once again proves the capability of the fully fledged trumpeter. The ambitious Trumpet Sextet in E flat minor brings to a close our journey through selected works of Oskar Böhme.

For many years little or no information was available about the composer. Oskar Böhme was born into a family of musicians near Dresden in 1870; he studied in Germany and Hungary and then emigrated to Russia, where he even changed his nationality in order to improve his chances of a place in one of the great orchestras. Despite his efforts to achieve perfect integration into Russian society, his German origins proved fateful when the Bolsheviks seized power – after years of persecution, he was executed for “anti-Soviet activities” on October 3, 1938.



“Oskar Böhme – Trumpet Concerto & Pieces” is the third album that Matthias Höfs has recorded with the German Chamber Orchestra of Bremen. After the trumpet concertos of Telemann and Bach, soloist and orchestra continue their fruitful cooperation with this Böhme album.