In 1994 DECCA issued a recording of Der Kaiser von Atlantis in the Entartere Musik series. The performance was conducted by Lothar Zagrosek. The orchestra was the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. The singers were Michael Kraus, Franz Mazura, Martin Petzold, Christiane Oelze, the late Walter Berry, Herbert Lipp and Iris Vermillion. The information about Suk is also in the booklet of this CD. There are also three songs on poems by Holderlin on this disc, performed by Iris Vermillion and with Jonathan Alder on the piano. A very fine recording!

By the way, Der Kaiser was premiered in Amsterdam in 1965. Suk also wrote a beautiful serenade for strings, sometimes issued on disc with Dvorak's famous serenade. To be honest, I never heard a boring work by Suk. I noticed only yesterday that the Andante from the Asrael Symphony reminds me a bit of Janacek's Sinfonietta. I heard a lot of interesting musical fragments in that German radio feature I told you about. There's still a lot more to explore in Suk.

I'm rather fond of endings which supply a question mark or are designed to make you feel uneasy at the way things have gone, lateral endings if you like. Many examples from Busoni and Duke Ellington - both notable for presenting unlikely solutions. One of my favourites is the end of the Pijper piano concerto (sounds as though he ran out of manuscript paper). If the examples seem rather arcane, even the last chord of the New World symphony has a suggestion of this.

I know exactly what you mean, Autoharp!  At least one of my examples has this - Madam Butterfly.  Puccini's toyed with us in B-minor for at least 2-3 minutes towards the end (from Pinkerton's offstage cries of "Butterfly!"), finally hitting us with that terrifying series of pentatonic orchestral-unison fragments, each one punctuated by a head-blasting B-minor chord supported by heavy percussion...   but then he finally takes us down the B-minor scale at the end, to hit us with a closing chord of...  G-major first-inversion??  (OK, I agree it might be considered a B-minor augmented chord, but it sounds like G-major to me!).

In the old WNO production (which I saw when it was touring in the mid-80s), Sharpless came on with Pinkerton, and grabbed him on this final chord, as though he was about to pummel his face...  it was very effective, and the blackout covered whatever came next... clearly indicating that although we had seen the life of Cio-Cio-San and for us the story was ending, this astounding chord announces "to be continued"....

Thank you most kindly, Pim!  I would certainly have missed it otherwise, and I am enjoying it as I type   I am interested in pieces with harmonium for practical reasons...  we are planning to perform Schoenberg's chamber-ensemble arrangement of DAS LIED VON DER ERDE later this year, and it would be a pity to miss the rare chances offered by having a harmonium on the stage

I think the Harmonium has similar associations with the Reformed and Protestant churches in Britain.  I had a student job playing one for a while in a Unitarian Chapel - sadly it was in desperately poor condition, and only 2 stops were even tolerably in tune.  It was, however, the only kind of organ on which I mastered the use of the pedals 

By the way, there is a gripping performance of the Brahms Piano F-Minor 5tet directly after the Suk :-)

I never realised or imagined that Eisler might have arranged Bruckner! That would be fun to hear, even though Bruckner is a sort of "black hole" for me normally

Simon, your message 18 astonishes me. How do you get on with the end of Chopin's A minor mazurka op 17 no 4 ?

I always see the start of this thread's title on the front page: 'Lead 'em by the nose...' and I always add in my head, '... and slap 'em in the face'.
Have I been spending too much time in the Other Place?

Simon - So the Chopin modulated to F ? Rather a lots of B naturals about ?