March 23, 2023

(++++) SYMPHONIES REIMAGINED

Schumann: Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4, reorchestrated by Mahler. ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop. Naxos. $13.99.

Edward German: Symphony No. 2, “Norwich”; Valse Gracieuse; Welsh Rhapsody. National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland conducted by Andrew Penny. Naxos. $13.99.

Bax: Symphonies Nos. 1-7 (complete); In the Faery Hills; The Garden of Fand; November Woods; The Happy Forest; Nympholept; Overture to a Picaresque Comedy; The Tale the Pine-Trees Knew; Into the Twilight; Summer Music; Tintagel. Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by David Lloyd-Jones. Naxos. $46.99 (7 CDs).

     The tendency to think of the composer’s wishes as sacrosanct and the interpreter’s job being to bring forth those wishes as accurately as possible is rather new. For many years – and certainly before the advent of historically informed performance study and practice – it was customary to play music based on what instruments and instrumental complements were available at a given time. So Handel achieved gigantism, Bach became known as a composer for piano, and Strauss waltzes were given by full-scale 100-person orchestras instead of the two dozen performers (sometimes fewer) for which they were conceived. In sensitive hands, adaptations of original compositions could provide a gateway for audiences to experience music in line with their expectations, while they would have turned away from the same works in their original forms. That was Gustav Mahler’s motivation in his many updatings and rearrangements of works from earlier eras: to bring acknowledged masterpieces to audiences that expected to hear them in the aural context to which they were accustomed. Mahler was a master orchestrator and a tireless searcher for older works that he, in his role as conductor, could bring to his audiences. And that is how he came to modify Schumann’s four symphonies for the newer instruments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and for orchestras of average size of about 90-100 instead of those of earlier times (average size 45-50). Marin Alsop and the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra offer Schumann’s third and fourth symphonies in Mahler’s reorchestrations on a new Naxos CD, and it is very interesting to hear just how carefully Mahler managed his modifications, even though they would largely be deemed unacceptable in today’s performance practices. Most of Mahler’s alterations can be considered fine-tunings (no pun intended), although the prominence of horns in the “Rhenish” certainly owes something to the later composer: valved horns were a major element in late-Romantic music, including Mahler’s own, but were still in development when Schumann created his symphonies. The most-interesting elements of Mahler’s changes in these two symphonies are in No. 4, which exists in earlier and later versions and has long led to debates about which of those is “better” (however that may be defined). Mahler started with the later version of the symphony (1851) and incorporated some elements from the original that Schumann wrote a decade earlier – a state of affairs that may please no one nowadays but that provides considerable insight into Mahler’s thinking about Schumann and the later composer’s own compositional process. Alsop is not a particularly sensitive or adept conductor in this music – she tends to approach all composers essentially the same way, failing to differentiate important stylistic elements. And she annoyingly intrudes into the music through rather fussy instances of unhelpful rubato, notably in the finale of the “Rhenish” and the first movement of No. 4. But the warm, deep sound of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra is a pleasure to hear at all times, and the orchestra’s scale certainly reflects Mahler’s expectations for his versions of these symphonies. There is no reason to own Alsop’s recordings of the Schumann/Mahler symphonies as a first choice in this repertoire today, but it is fascinating to hear – as a supplement to more-authentic performances – how Mahler managed to cast these works in a new light while remaining true to their basic character.

     A composer of Mahler’s time who also brought some elements of rethinking to symphonic form – but who, unlike Mahler, is not thought of as a symphonist – was Edward German, best known by far (to the extent that he is remembered at all) for his theatrical works. German was more of an experimentalist in non-programmatic music than he tends to be given credit for: his Welsh Rhapsody of 1904 is essentially a symphony in miniature (19 minutes) that is built entirely on traditional Welsh tunes, which German arranges and harmonizes and modifies and connects in genuinely symphonic ways that result in what is essentially a four-movement piece in which the melodies – sometimes complete and sometimes as fragments – are very cleverly developed and juxtaposed with secondary material created by German himself. In the new Naxos recording of the Welsh Rhapsody – actually a re-release of a performance dating to 1994 – Andrew Penny fully explores the symphonic nature of the material, giving it appropriate scale that stops short of grandeur or grandiosity but still makes it much more than a simple collection of folk-tune arrangements. And the disc also includes one of the two works that German really did label as symphonies: his second, known as the “Norwich” and dating to 1893. This is a larger-scale work than the Welsh Rhapsody and not quite as successful a piece: it goes through all the motions of a symphony adeptly and features some particularly skillful orchestration, but it never seems quite sure whether it wants to be taken highly seriously or prefers to be considered in a somewhat lighter vein – the third movement, Allegro scherzando, is certainly perkier than the remainder of the work. German’s two relatively unsuccessful symphonies (the first was written in 1887 and revised in 1890) led him to devote himself thereafter to non-symphonic endeavors – a disappointment to the composer himself, but actually a decision that led him to think symphonically about material, including the elements of the Welsh Rhapsody, that in other hands would scarcely have emerged in symphony-like form. Nevertheless, German is today thought of as a stage composer and purveyor of lighter classical music – and the third piece offered by Penny and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland shows why. The Valse Gracieuse (1895/1915), originally part of a four-movement work called The Leeds Suite, is quick and gracious, not really danceable despite its title, and contains some developmental elements of a near-symphonic sort, making German’s work in this respect more akin to the waltzes of Josef Strauss than to those of Johann Jr. German’s orchestration is particularly felicitous – he had considerable skill in instrumentation, if not at Mahler’s level – and the piece serves as a somewhat light, somewhat symphonic work that seems to straddle the worlds of slight and serious music without firmly committing to either. The same, in fact, may be said of German’s music as a whole.

     Arnold Bax (1883-1953) was of a later generation than German (1862-1936), and is much less associated with stage and lighter music – but in the symphonic realm, Bax had some sensibilities akin to those shown by German in works such as Welsh Rhapsody. Bax too was fascinated by legends of the British Isles, although Bax was from a wealthy cosmopolitan background while German traced his roots to Wales (the G in his name is a hard G; the name itself derives from “Gorman”). Bax completed seven symphonies, all of them rather substantial even though all are in three movements; but much of his work was in tone poems, which drew on a wide variety of legends and sylvan scenes – all treated in distinctly symphonic ways. A significant Naxos re-release of recordings of all the Bax symphonies and 10 of his tone poems – including the best-known, Tintagel – shows how Bax treated symphonic form quite differently from other British composers of his time (notably Elgar and Vaughan Williams) and also shows the clear relationships between Bax’s thinking in his pictorial tone painting and in his abstract symphonic music. The recordings featuring David Lloyd-Jones and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra date to 1995-2002. Lloyd-Jones has clearly thought carefully about this music and has brought its sometimes sprawling outlines under firm control. The symphonies were written during a comparatively compressed time span, with the first dating to 1921-22 and No. 7 to 1938-39 – Bax wrote almost nothing during or after World War II. Symphony No. 1 ties the most directly to external events – the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916 – but it is more a personal response to circumstances than a delineation of them or a setting of them in a symphonic context. In terms of incorporating external influences directly into the symphonies, Bax turned most often to the sea, which he frequently portrayed in his tone poems as well: Symphony No. 4 is particularly oceanic. Bax also reinterpreted other influences: Symphony No. 5 is dedicated to Sibelius and clearly shaped in part by the Finnish composer’s music, especially in Bax’s handling of brass, while Symphony No. 7 draws on Celtic influences. But nowhere did Bax incorporate folk material directly into his symphonic productions: he produced non-programmatic symphonies that drew on but were not subsumed within various myths and legends of Britain and nearby lands. In his symphonically structured and carefully developed tone poems, however, he delved directly and deeply into mythic Britain. Most of the tone poems are comparatively early works: In the Faery Hills dates to 1909 (revised 1921); The Garden of Fand – a seascape in its own right – is from 1913-16; November Woods was written in 1917; The Happy Forest is from 1914-21; Nympholept – the title refers to being caught and enraptured by nymphs – is from 1912-15; Into the Twilight dates to 1908; and Tintagel – yet another sea-inspired work, and an especially impressive one – is from 1917-19. The three remaining tone poems heard in this re-release are somewhat later: Summer Music was put into final form in 1932, although it originally dates to 1921; The Tale the Pine-Trees Knew, a particularly atmospheric and evanescent work, is from 1931; and Overture to a Picaresque Comedy, a brighter and livelier work than is typical of Bax, is from 1930. Like German, Bax had considerable skill in orchestration, but he also made demands on performers that can make his works hard to mount: he tended to call for very large orchestras that could give works highly specific colors – a darkness through the use of multiple low instruments, for example – but that could easily overwhelm musicians and audiences alike. Symphony No. 1, for example, insists on (among other instruments) four flutes (two doubling piccolo and bass flute), cor anglais, heckelphone or bass oboe, four clarinets plus a bass clarinet, a double-bass sarrusophone or double bassoon, tuba, two harps, and percussion including gong, glockenspiel, celesta and xylophone. Bax’s handling of his monumental forces tends to be closer to the massing of Richard Strauss than the chamber-music delicacy of Mahler, and the Bax symphonies and tone poems (which also require large forces) can all too easily come across as clotted with sound. It is to the considerable credit of Lloyd-Jones and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra that they allow Bax’s massive elements all the weight the composer wanted while effectively contrasting those portions of the symphonies and tone poems with passages of quiet beauty (Bax often ended works quietly, with a feeling of subsiding into silence). Bax’s symphonic works lack the monumentality of Elgar’s and the intensity of Vaughan Williams’. But they are very effective as presented in this boxed set, and offer an unusual opportunity to experience an approach to 20th-century symphonic construction that is not often encountered in the concert hall, where Bax’s symphonies – undoubtedly in part because of the sheer scale of their requirements – remain a rarity.

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