Again, just a few “representative samples” for (I hope) your delectation and delight. Click each one to read and enlarge.
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Schumann, a middle-class boy from the provinces, occupies one of the key positions in German music. The first Romantic with a deep knowledge of literature and philosophy, he saw it as his mission to fuse the arts, including traditional and modern composition. As a youth he wrote letters (“unsent”, as he admitted) to Schubert: he died a failure in his own eyes, yet he paved the way for a new generation of composers and established the style piano-writing would follow until the end of the 19th Century.
He was born in Zwickau, Saxony, in 1810. His father, a bookseller and novelist, died in 1826 whereupon Robert’s sister committed suicide, an event from which he never recovered. He enrolled in Leipzig University to study law, enjoyed the good life and the customary Grand Tour, and was told by his Professor that he had no talent whatever.
But he continued with his musical studies under Friedrich Wieck, a notable teacher in whose house he took lodgings. There he met Wieck’s daughter Clara, a nine year-old who was already showing signs of extraordinary ability as a pianist. Robert’s own hopes of becoming a virtuoso were soon dispelled by the crippling of his left hand – ostensibly the result of a machine designed to strengthen his fourth finger, but more likely due to poisoning by the mercury Schumann took when he realized he had a sexual disease (“My whole house is like a chemist’s shop” he told his mother). Fortunately he had already begun to show talent as a composer, and his knowledge of the piano liberated a richly imaginative idiom.
His Opus 1 Variations take as their motto the surname of Meta Abegg, an early love. He would use such codes to invent thematic fragments, which Schumann developed by harmonic progression; and this in turn affects the melodic line – a dialogue through evanescent changes of spirit and tonal modulation, which he felt reflected the ambivalence of his own nature. Despite his awe at classical forms, Schumann was quick to break away from them, creating instead music which reads like the pages of a diary: fragmented, condensed, profuse in musical invention: delicate portraits of a state of mind, based on literary allusion. His piano writing is entirely individual, using the sustaining pedal and mid-range of the instrument to make sound of sensuous brilliance. There’s also his quest to find new technical procedures (“a labour of Hercules”), which manifests itself in the Etudes Symphoniques. But then, almost all the piano music of the 1830’s is masterly: beginning with Papillons (1832), written as a suite of 12 waltzes inspired by Jean-Paul’s novel Die Flegejahre, ‘Years of indiscretion’. Carnaval followed in 1835, and brings to life the characters of Schumann’s secret world: Pierrot, Harlequin, Chopin and Paganini; alongside incarnations of Robert’s own baffling varieties and swings of mood.
From Die Flegeljahre he knew two personae, Walt and Vult, which personified human introversion and extroversion, those two facets which held man’s nature in balance. From these Schumann christened his own creative demons, Florestan and Eusebius, whose names recur in his work “in order to express contrasting points of view about art” as the composer explained, since he perceived music as having the theatrical cut-and-thrust of Hegelian dialectic. Then the were the Davidsbund, the band of David, a fictitious band of musicians at war against artistic philistines. The Davidsbund’s enigmatic signatures peopled the pages of Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, an iconoclastic musical journal of which Schumann was made editor.
If reading Heine and Hoffmann exacerbated Schumann’s tendency to melancholy, there was a more pressing reason for despair. His attempts to marry Clara, with whom he was now in love, were blocked by Wieck. There were reasons: Clara’s blossoming career (unquestionably sacrificed in later years by the hopeless demands of life with Schumann): the frivolities of a young man who showed little sign of being able to establish a serious musical vocation. In 1840 Schumann won legal action to overturn Wieck’s veto and the couple were married one day before Clara’s 21st birthday.
1840 was Schumann’s year of song, in which he composed two great cycles: Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und -leben. Both relate to his feelings for Clara, yet the sheer quality of their piano preludes and postludes adds a new dimension to the possibilities of lied. There was also the First Symphony. In 1842 Schumann’s study of Haydn inspired chamber music, including a masterly Piano Quinet: in 1843 Mendelssohn offered him piano professorship at the new Leipzig Conservatory. But Schumann’s lifelong manic-depression was now taking the form of increasing bleakness of vision and creative sterility, which manifested itself through serious breakdowns. He resigned and moved to Dresden but Clara’s tours, triumphs for herself as a concert-artist, only emphasized how widespread indifference to her husband’s music had become. He lacked the training to dash off musical money-spinners: operas, festival cantatas, frothy salon-pieces à la Spohr. His spell as conductor in Leipzig, beginning 1850, ended in recriminations and disaster. In 1854 he attempted suicide by throwing himself in the Rhine and he was committed to a private asylum near Bonn. There he died in July 1856 with the final ravages of tertiary syphilis, having starved himself through depression.
“The essence of romanticism” said Walter Pater, “is the blending of strangeness with the beautiful.” The young Clara knew Schumann as a “moonstruck maker of charades” and as he wrote to her, “I am affected by everything extraordinary that goes on in the world and think it over in my own way…then I long to express my feelings and find an outlet for them in my music: a poem, something infinitely more spiritual, the result of poetical consciousness.” In this way his music came to be the confessional for his inner life, a haven of mystical suggestibility, of all things unattainable and undefinable.
Wrong to ignore Schumann’s chamber music: wrong too to dismiss his symphonies. But it is the early piano works which have this enigmatic elusiveness, an aching incandescence which cannot be taken for either charm or rhetoric, although the illusions of those things are amongst many ciphers and traces that this most cryptic of composers leaves for his unsuspecting listeners. The truth, perhaps, involves something which transcends passion or nostalgia, compounded instead of vulnerability and the brightness of undimmed hope.
The quality of Schumann’s music – this transparent candour – does seem best served by recordings which reflect the most deeply individual commitment. Too many of those are now unavailable. Rubinstein’s 1960’s interpretations of Carnaval and the Fantasiestücke are promised re-release sometime at medium-price by BMG; no such luck, probably, for Murray Perahia’s 1970’s versions of Papillons and the Etudes Symphoniques (both CD 76635), which come only in an 11-disc set.
We have Horowitz’s vintage accounts from the Sixties in refurbished sound, although as one large boxed set. Several volumes are singled out for praise here, and others include performances of the Arabeske, Blumenstück, Toccata and Schumann’s self-portrait, Kreisleriana, which are surely as good as you will ever hear.
Piano Concerto in A minor, Opus 54
“So eminently beautiful from beginning to end” said Tovey. “So free, spacious and balanced in form, and so rich in ideas.” In 1841 Schumann composed one of half-a-dozen Konzertstücke: a single-movement, self-contained piece for piano and orchestra “something between a symphony, a concerto and a large sonata.” Rejected by the publishers, he decided to transform it into a full-length concerto but it was not until 1845 that he completed its intermezzo and finale. Liszt called it “a concerto without piano” and, anticipating its rejection, Schumann had declared he was unable to write a display piece. No matter. Supremely eloquent, the A minor at last triumphed as a vehicle for intimate dialogue and lyricism. Its antecedents are Beethoven’s concertos, particularly his Fourth. The motifs for both added movements are borrowed from the woodwinds’ opening theme.
Bishop-Kovacevich, BBC Symphony Orchestra; Davis. Philips 412923-2 with Grieg Piano Concerto (Price code 3)
Perahia, Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks; Davis. Sony SK 44 899 with Grieg Piano Concerto (Price code 3)
Two performances which stand out for their clarity of thinking, and each in its own way gets to the heart of the music. Perahia brings his sense of remembered and magical impulsiveness, and with his bright tone creates what you might call a sharp, crystalline surface. Kovacevich (less extrovert, less tangible, but with no less flair) is a version which is more about musical digging; and – in a concerto which often is made to fall apart – he gels with absolute conviction. With Kovacevich the music is about rapport, a mirrored and developing quality of line between soloist and orchestra that comes as naturally as breathing. The cadenza has a sense of revelation, fluidity of pulse that builds naturally from introspection without ever substituting force for the perception of how each phrase must work. For Perahia Davis’s phrasing has become edgy, to echo the soloist’s surging forward movement and bigger personality. Yet Perahia keeps it all in place by sudden and quixotic understatements, his power to take you by surprise with a winning aside. A sense of constant qualification, this; of building effects and redefining them: a searching intelligence which informs bubbly spontaneity. In the end Kovacevich has acuity of a deeper kind – responsiveness and easy grace that have not been bettered. Yet Perahia’s wit, his range and sense of adventure, are a delight. Sony’s recording too is 17 years newer and better.
Carnaval, Opus 9
Never did spontaneity, invention and superlative instrumental technique coexist more vividly for Schumann than here. Written in September 1834, Carnaval is a series of tableaux, a masked ball in which one character after another takes centre-stage.
It might also be seen as a set of quasi-variations, where Schumann proclaims his love for Ernestine von Fricken. The letters ASCH, which spell his own name in German musical notation (E flat, C, A flat and B) as well as Ernestine’s birthplace, litter the score – not only in the enigmatic Sphinx, that fabled setter of riddles. No, they generate too the themes for Promenade, Arlequin, Florestan, Chiarina, Estrella, Reconnaisance and Lettres Dansantes. So Florestan and Eusebius turn up as well; and in the inevitable March of the Davidsbündler they put the Philistines triumphantly to flight.
Cortot (GEMM CD 9931: price-code 3)
If Davidsbündlerstänze was the face beneath, said the composer, Carnaval was the mask. Nobody has understood its theatrical exuberance better than Cortot, and his 1928 performance sweeps away our current veneer of mawkish primness. This is Schumann grabbed by the throat, to remind you of Clara’s observation that her husband’s music contained no passagework. Very much historical sound, and the excerpts from Kreisleriana, Fantasiestücke and Davidsbündlerstänze themselves are all tantalisingly incomplete. An invaluable postcript – more, in this main piece – to Schumann interpretation almost 70 years later.
An excellent deal from DG’s Resonance series (431 167-2), where Daniel Barenboim plays not only Carnaval but a sensitive Kinderszenen and the sadly under-rated Faschingsschwank aus Wien. The pianist’s habitual and airless didacticism is reduced to only a hint here, for there are always fresh insights alongside the essential momentum. Not the subtlest presentation, nor the most charming; but a big personality at work and at modest price a perceptive introduction to this composer.
If you’re bargain-hunting Carnaval on a higher budget, Kempff on his 4-disc Schumann survey (DG 435 045-2: medium price) finds, alongside hints of agreeable idiosyncracy, an extra dimension of space and freedom.
Kinderszenen, Opus 15
Written in February 1838, Scenes from Childhood were suggested by Clara’s comment that Schumann sometimes seemed to her like a child. These tiny and exquisite genre pieces are very much the recollection of an adult, yet one whose rapport with childhood – the capacity of an innocent to discover both delight and injury – was painfully acute. Amongst them are Schumann’s evocations of emotions in their purest state (and this had a mystical significance to him) to create by juxtaposition a framework of unity, variety and balance. The set opens with “Of Strange Lands and People” (the storyteller’s “once upon a time”) and only at the end does an adult step forward: “The Poet Speaks.” But titles suggested themselves after the music was written, and it is the music’s sense of trancelike inevitability and levitation that gives its enchantment: the floating syncopations of “Almost Too Serious”, perhaps; the phrase with which “Entreating Child” both opens and closes (speaking technically, on a dominant seventh) so that the piece ends as it began, and hangs quizzically in space. A child’s conception of play, grandeur, fright, happiness and peace.
Horowitz (Sony Collected Edition – not available separately)
If the quality of any musician lies in the quality of choices he makes, then Horowitz’s insight and resource in this repertoire is without equals. The early Sixties caught his interpretation at its freshest. “An easy elegance” Rubinstein remembered of him, “a magic which defied description.” But one can try. Apparent simplicity was part of the formula, Horowitz knew that; but with it a quality of revelation, of expectations transformed through his sense of the piano as a singing voice. Kinderszenen is artless music, and artlessness is where naïvety and experience coincide. To conjure it up you need to be a master not of musical argument, but of fleeting effects to shine in their liquidity and colour. This Horowitz brings; but also a higher cohesion, and with it a luminous presence of remembrance.
Horszowski too, in a memorable three-disc recital (Elektra Nonesuch 7559-7961-2) offers a intensely personal account, but Horowitz’s clean technique gave him an edge. On a single disc, Martha Argerich (DG 410 653-2, with a distonguished Kreisleriana) is straightforward yet deeply astute. For those on a tight budget, Idil Biret’s childhood anthology (Naxos 8.550885) will do well enough.
Etudes Symphoniques, Opus 13
The dogged gestation of these studies, between 1834 and 1852, befits one of the cornerstones of Romantic piano literature. They began life simply, as variations on a theme written by Ernestine’s father the Baron von Fricken. Florestan and Eusebius, conspicuous in early drafts, soon take backstage to the “symphonic” possibilities of the instrument for blending, contrasting, superimposing timbres. Bold technical experiment is there, that exuberant discovery of what the piano alone could do: clarifying dense planes of polyphony, presenting themes against a background of tonal reverberation in a way that anticipates Debussy, controlling a development of ideas in which imaginative freedom and musical logic fuse into one. But there is something less obvious about the fifth of the posthumous etudes here. Worthy of the Impressionists, it commemorates the special point in Schumann’s researches at which he came to recognise what Piero Rattalino calls “an almost elemental vibration of the keyboard at the threshold between sound and silence.”
Sviatoslav Richter (piano) Olympia OCD 339 (price code 3)
For Richter the opening is grave and spacious, the variations aligning private meditation with a burning urgency whose momentum never flags, and which catches the leanness and ardour of Schumann in his prime. Richter as no-one else thinks through the dialectic, the interludes and organic structure of this music in playing of orchestral richness and power. A performance which rethinks as it moves and reminds us of the music’s infinite capacity to be discovered afresh.
This is Richter in his grandest manner. For those who resist such driving imperative force, Pollini has a performance of similar analytic rigour within a less imposing personal idiom. Pollini’s range of tone is second to none, and because of a lack of obtrusive rhetoric, here far more than in most interpretations is a sense of dance-like inevitability. He couples it with a touching account of that little miracle of considered innocence, the Arabeske (DG 410 916-2).
Phantasiestücke, Opus 12
The Phantasiestücke were composed between May and July 1837, shortly after Clara had returned all Schumann’s letters. And Opus 12 is dedicated to a Scottish pianist, Roberta Laidlow.
Schumann recognized the fragility of inspiration, which he felt sprang from hidden depths to vanish as consciousness was reached. The titles of the Phantasiestücke evoke what to Romantics was a higher reality: the world of night, twilight and dreams. Never are these chimerical mood-pictures more poetic, or more sensitively treated. Warum (“why?”) is the subject of momentary dialogue rather than formal development: Des Abends, however serene its surface, moves into unexpected keys to create a sense of revelation within absolute stasis. Grillen and Auschwung (“Soaring”) spin passing fancies into miniature sonata-rondos.
“The Last Recital for Israel” Rubinstein (piano) RCA 09026 61160 2 (with Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy: price code 3)
The celebrated octogenarian was recorded live. His command of the ebb and flow of musical phrases was as alluring – the refinement of diction and sonority as sophisticated – as ever: his capacity to charge the emotional atmosphere on a single note seemed as striking as it always had been. A noisy audience you can just about tolerate; slips of finger too, given playing of such finesse as this. Less acceptable is the wall of hiss and analogue tape distortion at climaxes. But if this is a special event to savour more in its video form than on disc, it reveals playing which takes for granted more musicianship than many of the names littering today’s catalogue prosaically in this repertoire, ever knew. A fair enough stopgap pending Rubinstein’s studio version of the decade before, or a single-disc issue from Perahia.
Fantasia in C, Opus 17
In 1838 Schumann wrote to Clara: “I have just finished a fantasy in three movements that I sketched in all but the detail in June 1836. The first movement is, I think, the most passionate thing I have ever composed – a deep lament for you.” Possibly so (again, there are internal codes) but the work’s origins lie in an attempt to raise funds for a monument to Beethoven. Schumann thought he could contribute best with a commemorative sonata, and the original titles of its movements are ‘Ruins’, ‘Triumphal Arch’ and ‘Wreath of Stars’. The Fantasia is the most successful of Schumann’s music in this form; it has Beethovenian drive and verve. But a quotation from An die ferne Geliebte links Schumann to Clara as well; and if the Fantasia’s march (“it makes me hot and cold all over” Clara wrote) is worthy of Beethoven’s Opus 101 piano sonata, its finale (as ardent and as tender as anything Schumann ever wrote) seemed to Adorno to “open upon an undefined vastness.” Magnificent piano writing shows Schumann at his most advanced: chromaticism, cross-rhythms, syncopation, arpeggiation, counter-melodic chords – all helping to envelope supreme lucidity in what Gerald Abraham called “a rich, diffused, Romantic light.” The composer himself quotes Schiller: “Through all sounds in the coloured earthly dream resounds a quiet sound drawn for him, who secretly listens.”
Horowitz Collected Edition Vol I (Sony Classics S2K 53457)
Pollini (DG 423 134-2, with Schumann: Opus 11 Sonata. Price code 3)
Horowitz’s recording is a document of one of the major concerts of the 1960’s, his return to the platform after years of fearful introspection. Forget the odd fluffs of finger and what opens up is a testimony to human courage as much as towering musicianship, yet one for which no allowance has to be made. The first movement reveals mercuriality harnessed to a massive and dynamic musical intelligence, with the left hand (a mannerism in later years) providing surging motive force. The finale demonstrates the discretion and resonance he brought to articulation, creating a weightless shimmer of sound, a melting freedom and fluidity of pulse. This was Horowitz at his best: heard over long melodic lines, where his sense of movement was inimitable, and even at a whisper – especially at a whisper – his special composure; the intimacy and space and seemingly enraptured concentration that almost flawless technical reserves make possible.
But there is a major account which is available on a single issue. With 1973 sound, with the benefits of studio takes, Pollini’s judgment is impeccable; and a performance of real distinction and freshness is coupled with our recommendation for the First Sonata. An irresistible disc, this; even if amongst digital recordings, Murray Perahia’s (Sony MK 42124, with Schubert Wanderer Fantasy) shows the capacity to think afresh, to mould cadences, which has consistently marked him out as one of the finest pianists of his generation. There is, it seems, a deliberate attempt to broaden his range of tone, heard after which Pollini might more simply be felt to get to the point.
Piano Sonatas
The first of three sonatas was written between 1832-5. Schumann struggled with its organisation yet its slow and best movement, all changes of key, catches something of his delight in the strangeness of everyday experience. The Second Sonata, from between 1832 and 1838, is more assured in its process of thematic transformation: remoulding its motifs through recitatives, conflicts, glittering figurations. A handful, no doubt; but also one of the masterly achievements of romantic pianism. ‘Possession’ is a word that comes to mind, as if what Chopin called the gossip of the Funeral March Sonata could be whipped into a frenzy and silenced by strange, numinous poise.
No 1 in F sharp minor, Opus 11
Pollini (DG 423 134-2: with Schumann Fantasie. Price code 3)
With a stream of fugitive ideas rather than formal development, this is Schumann at his most Romantic and his hardest to bring across. Pollini’s command of articulation and voicing means that, in playing whose momentum never flags, he is able to combine impetuousness with an almost Mendessohnian fleetness of touch. The aphoristic whispers of the Aria are captured hauntingly but so too, in gaining a proper proportion and context for each of so many effects, this is playing unlikely to be surpassed.
No 2 in G minor, Opus 22
Argerich DG Galleria 437 252-2 with Liszt Sonata in B minor, Brahms Opus 79 Rhapsodies (medium price)
Superlative pianism from Martha Argerich. So fearless is her virtuosity that whole passages of notes, whilst retaining perfect transparence, seem to dissolve into colour. There’s a sense of improvisation about this, so that the Andantino is sketched so diaphanously it might be a moving veil, yet supremely composed. One of too few discs from a very special artist.
Much better recording for Murray Perahia (Sony MK 44569, with Schubert’s D959 Sonata), who presents the sonata as something heavier. Proto-Brahms, you might say: some very tender episodes, but after Argerich he does seem to plod.
Papillons, Opus 2
Schumann once referred to himself as a chrysalis, and he spoke of the germs of many of his works as “papillons”: motifs which could appear or disappear, fly forward or backwards, assume infinite shapes and colours. The papillon that ascends at the opening of Opus 2 fades past vanishing point at its end – in just the same way, Eric Sams suggests, as the hero of Flegeljahre. If between this lies the most volatile and spontaneous music Schumann wrote, so much is a case of art concealing three years’ effort, the final distillation of countless sketches and rearrangements.
Ashkenazy Decca 414 474-2 (with Sinfonsiche Etüden, Arabeske: price code 3)
This is a trenchant performance of Schumann’s most charmingly capricious apparitions. Ashkenazy finds their lightness as well as resilience through playing where subtlety and vigour are well-matched. Not quite an interpretation to match Perahia, for those who can afford Sony’s boxed set; but excellent in its own right and coupled with a good, meaty version of the Etudes Symphoniques.
Davidsbündlertänze, Opus 6
Written in 1837, the Davidsbündlertänze begin with a musical motto composed by Clara, and most of the dances use its interval of a falling second as their starting-point. Eighteen mood-pieces, capturing supremely the range and shades of Schumann’s art, and amongst their titles: “Rather cockeyed…wild and merry…as if from afar…with this Florestan closed, and his lips twitched sadly.” Schumann quotes a traditional poem as the motto: “In all and every time, pleasure and pain are linked.” Songs-without-words and refractory humour and alternate with the sinewy writing that provided a model for piano composition to the end of Schumann’s century.
Kempff DG 435 045-2 (in a four-disc collection: medium price)
Throughout his Schumann survey Kempff played with classical refinement and customary intelligence, crisply urbane. If there’s a vein of fantasy to the music – quixotic, intractable – that was made earthbound (sober, but never prosaic) there seemed far more a compensating wisdom to bring tangibility rather than labour; a level of illumination offering, just as much as Cortot, a corrective to the turgid dramatics of today.
On a single disc in good digital sound, Ashkenazy’s reading (Decca) is fervent and brightly characterised. With it comes a version of the Opus 12 Phantasiestücke which, whilst not the most polished thing Ashkenazy has done, is as good as most in the catalogue.
Dichterliebe, Opus 48
Dichterliebe takes its poems from Heine and introduces to German song a new mingling of sentiment and irony, much as the text had done for German verse: a weary world of disillusionment in which nature acts not as a deciding influence, as for Schubert, but as an adjunct, a coloration and reflection, to a bittersweet love-story. Dichterliebe takes the lied to a new level of evolution: the piano becomes more than even for Schubert an active partner, combatant, commentary. It assumes a metaphysical dimension, for its long postlude suggests how the realms of poetry may open for the writer once the real world has failed.
Alfred Brendel has said the songs are a continuation of Schumann’s character-pieces for piano. But they are more besides. In addition to their second layer of tone-colour, the lyrical element has been set free and its emotional content made precise. As the composer put it, “a deeper insight into my inner musical workings.”
Fischer-Dieskau (baritone) with Brendel. Philips 416 352-2, with Schumann Liederkreis (price code 3)
Wunderlich (tenor) with Giesen. DG Dokumente 429 933-2 with Schubert and Beethoven recital (Medium price)
If you could combine Wunderlich’s vocal resources with Fischer-Dieskau’s insight, what a disc you’d have. “Melt in the mouth” someone said of one of this century’s finest tenors, who made his recording in 1966 before an early death. The singing is richer than Fischer-Dieskau’s, smoother too; although Ich grolle nicht is eager in a way that Fischer-Dieskau can only hint at. There’s the yearning of Wunderlich’s Ich will meine Seele tauchen compared to the crusty inertia of a baritone voice past its prime, but the merits are not all on one side. Fischer-Dieskau has a perception of dramatic narrative that leaves Wunderlich behind, as when Wenn ich in deine Augen sei’ subsides to a whisper; and Brendel is his creative partner rather than accompanist in music whose valedictory power and anger are only with Fischer-Dieskau brought out. If you want the marvellous Liederkreis, first choice is clear. Otherwise these songs might have been written for a voice of Wunderlich’s youth and freshness.
Symphonies
Schumann had tinkered with sketches for a major orchestral work, but like Brahms lacked the courage to pursue them further. The discovery of Schubert’s Ninth gave him the encouragement to try again, and in 1841 the Spring Symphony was published. It was inspired by Alfred Böttger’s poem, and the movements were originally entitled ‘Spring’s awakening’, ‘Evening’, ‘Merry Playmates’ and ‘Full Spring’.
The rest were written during Schumann’s collapsing career: the Second (Opus 61) in 1845, the Rhenish (Opus 97, so-called because its stateliness recalls a ceremony at Cologne Cathedral) in 1851. The Third’s opening anticipates Brahms’s Third Symphony (scarcely fortuitous) and its last movement was described by Sir Donald Tovey as “one of the finest pieces of ecclesiastical polyphony since Bach”. The Fourth Symphony (Opus 120, with an expansive climax to prefigure Wagner) was written between 1841 and 1852.
If these are symphonies which need to be driven – made to come alive, rather than expected to leap off the page – that is no more than can be said of their great Schubertian inspiration. The Fourth won Tovey’s admiration in that it is through-composed as one seamless development of revolutionary originality.
What they lack is Schubert’s clarity of instrumentation and thinking. External compromise seems to be the reason, since if Schumann’s efforts to reorchestrate his first throughts invariably make them more opaque than before, they do make inner parts louder and easier to play when attempted by inept orchestras and conductors. He had experience of both. Mahler reorchestrated the cycle, domesticating it and failing to restore a declining reputation. Yet there is a great deal here to do away with the myth of Schumann’s final years being those of unmitigated decline.
Staatskapelle Dresden; Sawallisch EMI CMS 7 64815 2 (two discs: price code 3)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra; Karajan DG 429 672-2 (two discs: medium price)
Honours are divided between these two, for Sawallisch’s pace and Karajan’s characterisation of episodes each brings rewards. Unfortunate that the BPO’s interpretation of the first and most famous symphony is so eclipsed by Sawallisch’s euphoric vitality, for Karajan gives No 2 a reading of real stature, a breadth and grip that makes you wonder at the work’s neglect and creates a slow movement worthy of Bruckner. In the Fourth Sawallisch moves like a fast wave, whilst Karajan gathers paced resources towards an inexorable climax. In the end Sawallisch’s sweeping imagination is irresistible – and if the recording sounds like something held in a cavernous bathroom, it comes up cleanly enough.
Stephen Jackson's Music 