condition (records/box): NM / NM Insert included. | The opening volume of the Deutscher Musikrat's monumental ten-volume documentation of contemporary music in the Federal Republic of Germany, covering the period 1945-1950 - the years of rubble, reconstruction, and the fraught question of what German musical culture could or should become after catastrophe. No volume in the series carries a heavier symbolic weight than this one, and it begins with the only possible piece: Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen (1946), the great study for 23 solo strings, an elegy for a destroyed civilization composed as Allied bombs were still falling on Munich and Dresden. The performance here is by the Bamberger Symphoniker under Clemens Krauss - an orchestra itself born from displacement, assembled largely from Sudeten German musicians expelled from Czechoslovakia. Nearly twenty-eight minutes of music in which the entire weight of a ruined tradition seems to pass through the strings, arriving finally at its buried quotation from the Eroica funeral march.

Werner Egk's La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1947), after airs and verses from the eighteenth century, occupies the full second side - twelve short movements for alto voice and string quartet with added instruments. The recording features Janet Baker with the Koeckert-Quartett and members of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks. Egk, one of the most contested figures in postwar German music - successful under the Nazi regime, rapidly rehabilitated after 1945 - here turns to French baroque sources with an elegance that sidesteps the question of guilt entirely. The piece charms and unsettles in equal measure.

Paul Hindemith dominates the middle of the set with three works that together span his late period. Apparebit Repentina Dies (1947), for mixed choir and ten brass instruments, is one of his most severe and imposing sacred works - a medieval hymn on the Last Judgment set with an austerity that could only have come from a composer who had watched Europe destroy itself from American exile. The Rundfunkchor Köln performs under Herbert Schernus. The 6. Streichquartett (1946), played by the Kreuzberg-Quartett on instruments including a 1717 Stradivari and a 1734 Petrus Guarneri of Mantua, is Hindemith at his most concentrated - four movements of rigorous, luminous chamber writing. The Sinfonie in B für Blasorchester (1951), under Hanns-Martin Schneidt, closes Hindemith's contribution with a work of ceremonial clarity, its final fugue one of the most assured in his output.

The last disc turns to figures less well known outside Germany but central to the country's postwar musical life. Ernst Pepping's O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden (1949), from his Liederbuch after poems by Paul Gerhardt, is sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Arthur Rother - a deeply moving setting of the great Lutheran chorale text, performed by the young Fischer-Dieskau with the directness and gravity that would define his art. Johann Nepomuk David's Deutsche Messe Op. 42 (1950) for a cappella choir, performed by the N.C.R.V. Vocal Ensemble Hilversum under Marinus Voorberg, represents the conservative wing of postwar German composition - rooted in the choral tradition of Bruckner and Distler, and no less serious for it. Philipp Jarnach, Busoni's closest pupil and the man who completed Doktor Faust, contributes Das Amrumer Tagebuch Op. 30 (1947), a suite of three piano pieces - Hymnus, Elegie, Sturmreigen - performed by the composer himself. The set closes with Hermann Reutter's Konzertvariationen für Klavier und Orchester (1951/52), with Branka Musulin as soloist and Georg Solti conducting the Radio-Sinfonie-Orchester Stuttgart - a bravura concertante work that points toward the confidence of the new Federal Republic.

3LP box set with 42-page booklet. Released on Deutsche Harmonia Mundi / EMI Electrola, DMR 1001-3. Recordings from Bayerischer Rundfunk, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, RIAS Berlin, Süddeutscher Rundfunk and Polydor International.