Sugar rush | 7 December 2017

To get a flavour of Joseph Marx’s An Autumn Symphony, picture the confectionery counter in a grand Viennese café. Beneath the glass lies sweetness beyond imagining: towers of sponge cake, billows of whipped cream, and icing that shines red and orange. You wander down the display: there are Sachertortes, petits fours, candied angelica and glacé cherries. It goes on — dark chocolate glints over golden pastry and pink marzipan cushions swell beneath tangles of spun sugar. At which point you realise that what you really want is an espresso and a bread roll.

And it looked like it would be such a treat, too. There’s hot competition for the title Last of the Viennese Romantics but Joseph Marx, who died in 1964, is a definite front-runner; a composer of well-made songs and lavish orchestral music written in a style that is (to borrow a phrase from Michael Haas, author of Forbidden Music) not so much post-Romantic as hyper-Romantic.