The orchestral songs by the now almost forgotten Viennese composer and late Romantic Karl Weigl date from 1916, while the Rhapsody for String Orchestra, although dating back to the String Sextet composed in 1906, was composed together with the Piano Concerto only in 1931 and, like the latter, betrays a progressive and yet completely organic, natural development. There are neither radical changes of direction nor any signs of stagnation in Weigl’s work. We can perhaps best see where Weigl was to be placed in the New Music of the twenties from the fact that the Composition Prize of the City of Vienna in 1925 was awarded to four prominent artists: Karl Weigl, Franz Schmidt, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Weigl never reached the dissonant extremes of expression with his language as Alban Berg did, but the works on this CD show that he often ventured to the limits of his self-imposed scope. The Piano Concerto is the most unusual and original work on this CD, illustrating the transition from the tantalisingly seductive language of Weigl’s early Viennese works to a more powerful, definite tone.”The Austrian composer Karl Weigl, born in 1881, who emigrated to the USA in 1938 because of his Jewish origins and died in New York in 1949, has been rightly discovered discographically in recent years. The CPO label has played a key role in this. Now an album has been released there on which Weigl’s “Three Songs for a High Female Voice with Orchestra” (1916) as well as the “Rhapsody for String Orchestra” (1935) and the late-Romantic-feeling Piano Concerto op. The Jena Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Simon Gaudenz (soprano: Lina Johnson, piano: Oliver Triendl) unleash a magical sound that is perfectly suited to these works, which were conceived in the spirit of the Viennese Fin de Siècle. (Südwest-Presse, Burkhard Schäfer)