"The Cologne Broadcasts"

This leaves Heinz Holliger with the WDR Symphony of Cologne as prime recommendation. Long crucial to his work as composer and conductor, Holliger’s Schumann has all one might wish for – the leanness of a chamber orchestra, impact of larger forces, clarity of an authentic approach and creative acumen of one conscious of his role as being more than merely putting musicians through their paces. Some examples from each movement illustrate this: in the first, his emphasis on the Un poco più vivace transition (1'54") as it prepares for then motivates the ensuing Allegro; in the Scherzo, his consistency of pulse which integrates the Trios (1'39" and 4'15") and underlies the (relative) acceleration into the coda (6'24"); in the Adagio, his handling of the spectral interlude (3'57") that links each half while emotionally heightening the latter; and, at 4'00" in the finale, after the movement has reached near-stasis, his winsome underlining of the quotation from Beethoven’s song ‘Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder’ (the last of the cycle An die ferne Geliebte) which then makes possible the ultimate affirmation.

Almost 175 years since its completion, Schumann’s Second Symphony can, more than ever, be heard as the true embodiment of musical mid-Romanticism, as well as being the salient symphonic achievement from that interregnum stretching between Schubert and Bruckner.

Schumann has long been central to Heinz Holliger’s creative thinking. His Cologne account – part of the most inclusive overview of Schumann’s orchestral works to date – fuses chamberlike clarity, authenticstyle astringency and full-orchestral immediacy for astounding results.

Arndt Cobbers: 2. Schumann, Sämtliche Sinfonische Werke Vol. 5; Kopatchinskaja, Lonquich, WDR Sinfonieorchester, Holliger (Audite): Das als problematisch geltende Spätwerk in fesselnden Interpretationen.

"Robert hat ein höchst interessantes Violinkonzert beendet, er spielte es mir ein wenig vor, doch wage ich mich darüber nicht auszusprechen, als bis ich es erst einmal gehört", notiert Clara Schumann am 7. Oktober 1853 in ihr Tagebuch. In nur zwei Wochen hat Robert die Partitur geschrieben, rasend schnell, die Uraufführung in Düsseldorf ist drei Wochen später geplant, und Solist Joseph Joachim muss ja noch üben können. Aber die Düsseldorfer kippen das Programm. Ein einziges Mal nur kann der Komponist sein Werk hören, unzureichend, bei einer Probe in Hannover, die Joachim im Januar 1854 organisiert. Einen Monat später versucht Schumann, sich im Rhein zu ertränken, zwei Jahre später stirbt er in Bonn.

Ach, hätten ihm Geisterstimmen doch noch zugeflüstert, dass 150 Jahre später fast alle großen Geiger sein Stück spielen würden! Vorläufige Krönung: drei der derzeit profiliertesten Geigerinnen. Als erste legte Isabelle Faust vor einem Jahr ihre Aufnahme mit dem Freiburger Barockorchester vor, es folgte Patricia Kopatchinskaja mit dem WDR-Sinfonieorchester, und nun ist auch Carolin Widmanns Aufnahme mit dem Chamber Orchestra of Europe (COE) zu haben. Die Musikerinnen, alle zur Generation der frühen 1970er zählend, haben endgültig jene Stufe der Rezeption gezündet, auf der es nicht mehr um eine umstrittene Rarität geht.

Denn dieses Werk gehört zum Großartigsten, was Schumann für sinfonische Besetzung geschrieben hat. Ein neuer Ton ist da zu hören, im ersten d-Moll-Satz blockhaft Archaisches in expressive Rückblicke drängend, im zweiten Satz subtilste Rhythmik. Mit dem Finale indes hatte schon Clara ein Problem, und Joachim fand es "entsetzlich schwer für die Geige". War das ein Grund, die Partitur zu verstecken? Auf Claras Wunsch kam sie nicht in die Gesamtausgabe. Joachim, Besitzer des Autographs, verwies dazu 1889 auf "eine gewisse Ermattung, welcher geistige Energie noch etwas abzuringen sich bemüht".

Auf ihn und Clara geht die zählebige "ideé fixe" zurück, Schumanns Spätwerk zeige Züge geistiger Zerrüttung. Joachims Sohn verkaufte das Autograf der Preußischen Staatsbibliothek 1907 mit der Auflage, das Konzert 100 Jahre lang nicht zu publizieren, Schumanns Tochter Eugenie wehrte sich noch als Greisin gegen die Publikation, die 1937 nur möglich wurde, weil die Nazis einen "arischen" Ersatz für das Violinkonzert von Felix Mendelssohn brauchten. Dem Nationalgeiger Georg Kulenkampff war die Partie zu schwer (anders als zur selben Zeit dem jungen Yehudi Menuhin in den USA), und kein Geringerer als Paul Hindemith gab sich dazu her, von 523 Takten der Sologeige mehr als die Hälfte umzuschreiben, sie hochzuoktavieren, einfacher spielbar und dabei "brillanter" zu machen – was faule Routiniers gern "dankbar" nennen.

Auch diese "Uraufführung" vom 26. November 1937 kann man nun wieder hören, ohne die einleitenden Worte von Propagandaminister Goebbels zu Beginn dieser "Kraft durch Freude"-Veranstaltung in Berlin. Georg Kulenkampff hetzt durch den ersten Satz wie durch eine Zirkusnummer, den letzten Satz hat er von Schumanns Metronomzahl 63 auf 104 hochgedreht, und der langsame Satz versinkt zum Glück im spacigen Zirbeln der Interferenzen und Datenverluste, die sich beim Überspielen welker Wachsplatten auf Band ergaben. Obwohl auch Yehudi Menuhin das Werk wenig später in den USA spielte, hatte es nun einen braunen Schatten zusätzlich zum Zerrüttungsverdacht. Wirklich verlässliche Notenausgaben gibt erst seit knapp zehn Jahren.

Diese lange Geschichte ist wie weggeblasen, wenn das famose Chamber Orchestra of Europe dirigentenlos in den ersten Satz einsteigt, schneller als von Schumann gedacht, voller Sturm und Drang. Die leeren E-Saiten der Geigen werden bewusst expressiv, fast schmerzhaft eingesetzt, was die Nachdenklichkeit der Solistin um so deutlicher macht. Den halben Noten zwischen ihren Sechzehnteln sinnt Carolin Widmann wie mit weiten Blicken nach, während Kopatchinskaja diese Töne ankrallt, hinschmeißt, fast wütend, und Isabelle Faust lange und kurze Noten in Schönheit verbindet – nuancenreich, nicht oberflächlich.

Das Freiburger Barockorchester, von Pablo Heras-Casado geleitet, entwickelt dabei nicht so viel Sog wie das Chamber Orchestra of Europe, lässt aber Registerwechsel, Farbkontraste deutlicher werden und ist trockener aufgenommen. Das größer besetzte WDR-Sinfonieorchester unter Heinz Holliger, als Autor ein kompetenter und subtiler Schumann-Versteher, wirkt dagegen etwas gedeckelt und unterspannt – in kuriosem Kontrast zur Geigerin Patricia Kopatchinskaja, der ihr Eigensinn öfter wichtiger ist als das poetische Potenzial der Musik. Krachende Tonbildung im Forte und Pianissimi an der Grenze der Hörbarkeit können durchaus nerven, auch wenn man ihr alle Aktionen glaubt und sich oft fragt, was ihr wohl als nächstes einfällt. Sie gibt ein bisschen das "bad girl".

Die Überraschungen ihrer Kolleginnen liegen in dem, was sie bei Schumann entdecken. Während Isabelle Faust ihn behutsam mit der weiten Welt verbindet, geht Carolin Widmann ins Innere und beschert uns im langsamen Satz die zärtlichsten Töne, unfassbar intim. Ihre schlichten leisen Synkopen in Takt 13 und 14 wagt man kaum ein zweites Mal zu hören, so etwas Unwiederbringliches haben sie. Dabei hilft freilich eine Aussteuerung, die die Solovioline auch bei leisesten Tönen unterstützt, während Isabelle Faust realistischer aufgenommen wurde, tiefer im Geflecht der umgebenden Töne. Genau das hat man Schumann – im bornierten Vergleich mit Genrestandards – vorgeworfen: Sein Solopart bewege sich zu oft im Schatten tieferer Lagen.

Vielleicht nimmt sich da einfach ein Subjekt zurück? Im Finale gilt das allerdings auch fürs Genie. Vielleicht war es Zeitdruck, der Schumann hier auf die "Images der Polenromantik" (so der Musikwissenschaftler Reinhard Kapp) vertrauen ließ: Eine gigantische Polonaise tritt auf der Stelle, Holzbläser verbreiten schauerlichen sächsischen Humor und die Geige spinnt fingerbrecherische Girlanden. Soll man das einfach schnell hinter sich bringen? Widmann und Kopatchinskaja drehen das Tempo auf 80 hoch, nur Faust lässt sich (fast) auf Roberts Angabe ein, und prompt scheint die Violine doch etwas zu sagen. Nur was? Rätsel hinter einer lächelnden Maske: Wir sollten nicht glauben, ihn jetzt zu kennen.

Japanische Rezension siehe PDF!

Japanische Rezension siehe PDF!

This is the sixth and final volume of Audite’s survey of the complete symphonic works of Robert Schumann. As is often the case with such productions, the last volume is the mop-up of miscellanea and usually seldom heard music. The Manfred Overture that opens the program is by far the best-known work here. It bursts forth with the heft and swagger that has been noted with unanimity by previous Fanfare reviewers of this series. Nearly all of the music on this CD is inspired by literature, and Holliger and his Cologne based band play with a fearless sense of theatricality. I will also echo my colleagues in praise of the orchestra’s lucidity of texture (it has been suggested that the use of smaller string sections in the WDR Symphony Orchestra helps to achieve this, although there is nothing in the notes for this volume to corroborate that claim) and for the excellence of the Audite audio engineering, a quality I am well familiar with from other Audite recordings.

While there are no revelations in this program, the music is generally of high quality, even though it comes from the end of Schumann’s career, perhaps something of a rejoinder to the “truism” that Schumann’s abilities and imagination had eroded somewhat at this point. The problem for the listener, at least this one, is that the blustery nature of this dramatic music becomes a bit wearisome by the end of a complete listening. In hindsight, it may have made more sense to have included these dramatic overtures in more varied programs of symphonies and concertos, as is usually the practice in presenting such work. The exception is the early attempt at symphonic writing by a 21-year-old Schumann, the incomplete Symphony in G-Minor, named for the city it was premiered in, Zwickau. It is replete with lovely writing, with the composer’s signature firmly in place.

The complete set of Schumann orchestral music by these forces is certainly a success by almost any measure. I would offer one caveat, and that is that the WDR SO, while excellent and a great pleasure to hear, lacks the ultimate degree of polish and finesse of the top-tier orchestras of the world. But I’m not sure how much that matters in this material, given that a certain degree of lustiness, if anything, enhances the expressiveness of the music.

As usual (as if you remember these things from one year to the next), I’ll lead up to my final choices with a few deserving near-misses. I’ll begin with a handful of mainstream releases, even though I spend most of my time looking into music’s more obscure corners. The final installment of Eivind Aadland’s five-volume survey of Grieg’s complete orchestral music (Audite 92.671)—Peer Gynt and orchestral songs, so it’s pretty familiar material—maintained the sterling virtues of the first four: This was the best Grieg recording to come my way in a long time. Manfred Honeck’s reading of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (Reference Recordings FR-720SACD) sent shivers down my spine—and it’s accompanied by Honeck’s own 20-minute fantasy on material from Dvořák’s opera Rusalka, which is wholly delightful. And Yevgeny Sudbin’s second Scarlatti recording for BIS (BIS-2138) presented astonishing pianism and lively musical imagination in equal measure.

But now it’s time to wander off the beaten track a little. A third volume of the Röntgen String Trios (Nos. 9–12) from the Lendvai String Trio (Champs Hill Records CHRCD101) kept that particular flag flying, but I have more Röntgen to come back to in my final five. Two recordings from The Sixteen brought music of extraordinary beauty: Vol. 1 of Monteverdi’s Missa a Quattro voci e salmi, conducted by Harry Christophers (Coro COR16142), and the fourth album in a series conducted by Eamonn Dougan that uncovers the music of the Polish Renaissance and here featured three Italian composers who worked in Poland: Asprilio Pacelli, Vincenzo Bertolusi, and Luca Marenzio (COR16141). Another BIS release brought the orchestral works of George Butterworth that we all know and love (The Banks of Green Willow, Six Songs from “A Shropshire Lad,” the Shropshire Lad rhapsody, Two English Idylls, and Love Blows as the Wind Blows), with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Kriss Russman, but added two new scores: Russman’s realization for string orchestra of the Suite for String Quartette and his completion of an Orchestral Fantasia, of which Butterworth left only 92 bars of score when he went off to war and an early death (BIS-2195). A Lawo Classics CD (LWC1101) from Rune Alver of the Norwegian David Monrad Johansen’s piano music made a better case for him than many of his more imposing scores and demonstrated how much the music of Debussy echoed round the fjords. A Neeme Järvi CD from Chandos, with the two suites from Martinů’s ballet Špaliček and the Rhapsody-Concerto for viola and orchestra, the latter with the violist Mikhail Nemtsov and the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (CHAN 10885), was nothing less than life-enhancing. A CPO CD of chamber music—Clarinet Quartet, op. 1; Fantasiestücke, op. 2; Violin Sonata, op. 6—by the Viennese composer Walter Rabl (1873–1940) was a revelation: music as good as Brahms’s, but Rabl stopped composing at the age of 30. This album makes it plain what a terrible loss to music that was, since he still had half his life ahead of him. Another CPO CD (777 687-2) brought Paul Graener‘s Piano Concerto, op. 72, Symphonietta, op. 27, Drei Schwedische Tänze, op. 98, and Divertimento, op. 67, from pianist Oliver Triendl and the Munich Radio Orchestra conducted by Alun Francis—such big-hearted music that one feels that, despite his association with the Nazi Party (he was vice-president of the Reichsmusikkammer from 1935 to 1941), he must have been a decent soul underneath it all. Last of my nearly-made-it recordings is Leo Ornstein‘s Piano Quintet and Second String Quartet, from Marc-André Hamelin and Pacifica String Quartet (Hyperion CDA68084)—just about the feistiest piano quintet you will ever hear.

Now to my final five. Neeme Järvi’s recording of Kurt Atterberg’s First and Fifth Symphonies made it into my Want List last year, and his account of No. 3, “West Coast Pictures,” does so this year as well. The entire album is nothing less than glorious, the chief glory being the 36-minute Third Symphony, composed in 1914–16 as (as the title, Västkustbilder, suggests) a series of tableaux depicting the Swedish west-coast archipelago where it was written. A double album of Korngold’s Complete Songs (not quite, in fact, since they left one or two things out) from baritone Konrad Jarnot and soprano Adrianne Pieczonka, with Reinild Mees at the piano, offered one masterpiece after another: There is not a weak bar in sight, and all of it glows with Korngold’s unique ardent lyricism. A three-CD set from the violinist Oliver Kipp and cellist Katharina Troe (Thorofon (CHT 2628/3) assembled all Röntgen’s works for solo violin, solo cello, and violin-cello duo and so offered a musical feast of astonishing richness, almost all of it completely known before now. The two string quintets by Sergei Taneyev—op. 14 in G Major and op. 16 in C Major—are both masterpieces that open windows on to the human soul; they get wonderful performances from the Utrecht String Quartet, joined by the cellist Pieter Wispelwey in op. 14 and violist Alexander Nemtsov in op. 6 (MDG603 1923-2). Finally, a boxed set of Telemann’s complete wind concertos (with La Stagione Frankfurt and Camerata Köln conducted by Michael Schneider; CPO 777 939-2) collects eight separate CDs released between 2007 and 2012, and brought eight-and-a-half hours of unalloyed pleasure. The very list of the 46 concertos assembled here beggars belief: All with strings and basso continuo, there are six concertos for flute and for two flutes and bassoon; five for oboe; four for two horns; two each for two oboes and bassoon, oboe d’amore, two chalumeaux (an early form of clarinet), recorder and two violins, two recorders; and one each for horn, two horns and two oboes, two oboes d’amore, two chalumeaux and two bassoons, recorder and flute, oboe and two violins, recorder, alto recorder, recorder and bassoon, recorder and horn, piccolo, trumpet, and trumpet and two oboes. And there’s not a dull piece among them—imagine a musical landscape somewhere between the Bach violin concertos and Handel’s concerti grossi and you’ll have some idea of the sheer delight awaiting the listener.

This is Volume 6 of Audite’s Complete Symphonic Works edition and contains Schumann’s earliest and latest pieces for orchestra, including all his overtures. As with his hero, Beethoven, Schumann’s overtures are better known than any of the stage or operatic music they precede. And, like Beethoven, Schumann had a gift for writing exciting, memorable overtures.

Beethoven’s influence is also obvious in the only non-overture here, the unfinished Zwickau Symphony of 1833; this is Schumann’s third and final revision of the first movement, so it lacks the slow intro of John Gardiner’s 1998 recording (DG 457591). Gardiner’s orchestra has 40 strings where Holliger’s has 60, plus Holliger’s accents are tempered and his pace relaxed, so I heard for the first time the influence of Louis Spohr—another hero of the young Schumann—in the wilting chromaticism of the s tring figures.

Before the two-movement symphony, Holliger raises the curtain on the concert with the mature sonata-form Manfred Overture. In it we hear Holliger’s approach to all the overtures: warm, genial, and flowing. He lets the dramatic tension build up slowly, free of histrionics, with subtle orchestral flexibility to broaden tempos for grand climaxes and lyrical passages. The violins are split left and right as they were in Schumann’s time and they play cleanly, without vibrato, and this clarifies Schumann’s allegedly thick and clumsy orchestrations. There’s no mention anywhere of period instruments or gut strings, so I assume they’re modern, but at 60 strong they don’t sound shrill, nor do they indulge any supposed historic practice like swelling on long notes.

The sound quality matches interpretation: warm, full, and detailed, especially the surround-sound recording, right now available only as a download from Audite’s website (mentioned on the back of the digipak). The improvement in three-dimensional depth and presence is unmistakable in the five overtures recorded in 2010 but subtle in the symphony and Manfred recorded in 2015. Considering the high quality of both performance and surround-sound recording, I hope Audite issues a boxed set of this complete series on SACD (or Blu-Ray).

The booklet is informative, recounting the circumstances of each piece’s composition. This is an attractive and rewarding survey of Schumann’s overtures and makes me want to hear the other volumes in the series.

Ein großer Zyklus kommt zum Abschluss. Nach den Sinfonien, Konzerten und Konzertstücken stehen in der letzten Folge der nahezu rundweg beeindruckenden Schumann-Einspielungen die Ouvertüren auf dem Programm. Das in Detmold beheimatete Label "audite" hat auch damit wieder einmal einen Coup gelandet. Konnte Heinz Holliger mit dem WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln schon zuvor besonders bei den Sinfonien überzeugen (bei den konzertierenden Solisten war der wählenden Hand das Glück nicht immer hold), wird hier nun für ein noch immer unbekanntes Repertoire eine Lanze gebrochen. Denn dass Schumann sich neben der genialen Manfred-Ouvertüre gerade in seinem Spätwerk intensiv mit der an großen Schauspielen orientierten Konzertouvertüre schöpferisch auseinandergesetzt hat, dürfte noch immer weithin unbekannt sein. Die Stücke sind im Konzertsaal wahre Raritäten und auf CD kaum einmal in der verdienten Qualität anzutreffen.

Holliger aber sind anscheinend gerade diese Partituren ans Herz gewachsen – so ausgeglichen und wirklich als große Werke gespielt habe ich sie noch nicht gehört. Und sie zeigen Schumann im vollen Besitz seiner Fertigkeiten. Wer noch immer von angeblichen Problemen bei der Instrumentation spricht, sollte eher von Problemen der jeweiligen Interpretation sprechen (einer meiner persönlichen Favoriten ist und bleibt die Ouvertüre zu "Julius Cäsar"). Der für Schumann charakteristische, kompakte Klang kommt jedenfalls dem Sinfonieorchester des WDR entgegen, das schon fünf der Kompositionen 2010 eingespielt und sich den "Manfred" wie auch die frühe, unvollständig gebliebene Zwickauer Sinfonie in g-Moll nun für das Finale aufgespart hat – nicht als Supplement, sondern als geniale Vorschau auf das, was noch kommen sollte. So gespielt wirken die beiden Sätze denn auch nicht als philologische Kuriositäten, sondern künstlerisch berechtigt. Aus Holligers Nähe zu Schumann ist hier mit kühlem Kopf etwas Erstrangiges erwachsen.

The Schumann Violin Concerto, rejected in his lifetime by its dedicatee, Joseph Joachim, and suppressed after his death by his wife Clara and devoted friend Brahms, is somehow entering its shining hour. “Somehow” refers to the considerable obstacles inherent in the score, which are open today to the same criticism it originally received from Joachim, who considered it the inferior product of an unstable mind. The music can be faulted as uninspired in its melodies, repetitive, disorganized in development, and feebly or incompetently orchestrated. Not many works can resurface after such a blanket condemnation, but advocates for late Schumann argue that he has unique intentions in mind, even as that mind became erratic. The argument isn’t worth entering, however, when confronted by a beautiful, intimately personal reading of the kind delivered by Isabelle Faust (Harmonia Mundi), backed by period-style accompaniment that edges Schumann into a different sound world from what we’re used to (reviewed in Fanfare 39:2).

As a non-fan of the Violin Concerto, I can hardly credit that I am even more enthusiastic about this new release in Heinz Holliger’s ongoing Schumann orchestral cycle, of which this is Volume 4, with the extraordinary violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja as soloist. In its daring departures from convention their reading surpasses Faust’s in fascination. To begin with, Kopatchinskaja, who was born in the former Soviet republic of Moldavia in 1977, has assumed the mantle of the late Lydia Mordkovitch for fierceness of attack and courageous nonconformity. Her timbre here is almost never consistent within a phrase or even beautiful. The tone whistles, whines, and scrapes as often as it sings, all in service of an interpretation that takes not a single note for granted. I associate this kind of keenly felt violin playing with Leila Josefowicz and more recently the young Norwegian phenom Vilde Frang. But Kopatchinskaja is the only violinist who has the ferocity to frighten me—I found her extreme interpretation of the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2 and the Stravinsky Violin Concerto with Vladimir Jurowski from 2013 (Naïve) almost too unsettling to listen to. But it and her other releases, especially a disc of violin concertos by Eötvös, Bartók, and Ligeti on the same label, have been rapturously received, or at the very least caused heads to turn. The same is certainly true here.

The Schumann Piano Concerto exists at the opposite end of universal love and admiration, which makes things difficult for a relative unknown like Hungarian pianist Dénes Várjon—he won’t be unknown to those who have heard his recordings on Naxos, ECM, Hyperion, Capriccio, and other labels (I seem to be out of the loop on this one). A graduate of the Liszt Academy in Budapest, where he now teaches, Várjon has recorded Holliger’s music under the composer, so I assume a close musical affinity. Here they collaborate to produce a reading of the A-Minor Concerto that I’d describe as streamlined but intense. Tempos and phrasing are not out of the ordinary. The total timing is about the same as for Jan Lisiecki’s recent DG recording (reviewed in Fanfare 39:5), but where Lisiecki is poetic to the point of being subdued, Várjon puts his technique on extrovert display. Short of Martha Argerich’s charismatic, rocket-fueled interpretations, this is one of the more engaging readings of the solo part that I’ve heard, even if the finale loses oomph after a while.

Heinz Holliger has focused his Schumann cycle on making us hear the music without prejudice and absent the traditional Schumann Romantic sound. His starkness in the Violin Concerto succeeds remarkably well, although the orchestral part in the Piano Concerto feels a little abrupt and dry at times. At 77 he’s very much a force to be reckoned with. Holliger’s transition from superstar oboist to composer and conductor has worked on all counts, although here he doesn’t make the WDR Symphony sound better than workmanlike. That hardly matters, nor does the good but not exceptional recorded sound. It’s Kopatchinskaja’s highly original playing that wins the day.

The fourth and fifth volumes of Audite’s Schumann series with Heinz Holliger and the West German Radio Symphony are in many ways the most fascinating so far and the toughest sell. The difficulty is obvious from a glance at the repertoire list: one masterpiece, one quasi-masterpiece, and four conspicuous examples of less than top-drawer Schumann.

The version of the Piano Concerto is all we’ve come to expect from this excellent series, including alert, rhythmically flexible playing from a first-class radio orchestra (people who play to microphones for a living), a conductor who knows his business in Schumann (a firm grasp of the long line, an ability to clarify the occasionally dense inner voicing, a total lack of fear when it comes to punching the telling accent, an uncanny knack for pointing out the previously overlooked—but deeply important—detail), together with superbly realistic recorded sound that nonetheless bathes everything in an early-Romantic glow. The young Hungarian pianist Dénes Várjon takes a wonderfully fresh and unaffected approach to this familiar music; while everything feels perfectly controlled, he bends the bar line in a way that recalls the great Schumann pianists of the past (Cortot and Rubinstein especially) but nothing feels willful or self-aggrandizing. If the finale lacks the head-long excitement of Fleisher, Janis, Richter, and others, then overall it’s an immensely satisfying outing that makes you want to hear some of the solo piano music from this source. (There’s already an excellent version of the violin sonatas with Carolin Widmann on ECM 1902 and an even finer recording of the cello music with Steven Isserlis on Hyperion 67661.)

Wild child Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s presence guarantees an immensely individual look at the problematic Violin Concerto, and, as usual, she doesn’t disappoint. From her first entrance, it’s a startlingly original interpretation, with a seemingly endless variety of tone color—insured by her endless types of vibrato—down to that chilling moment in the heart of the first movement where the line is so drained of life it sounds like someone keening at a funeral. (There are other moments where the sound is so intense at the lower range of audibility that you wonder if she heard of Leonard Bernstein’s extraordinary instruction to a string section: “Play triple piano, but use the kind of vibrato you use playing triple forte.”) Holliger adds as much point and thrust as he possibly can to the outer movements—especially the opening movement, which for once never seems to drag—and although the slow movement seems less a premature anticlimax than usual, things never quite add up (as they never quite have, at least on records).

Kopatchinskaja is just as committed and persuasive in the violin Fantasie, whose gypsy-like opening flourishes are a reminder that it was written for the Hungarian-born Joseph Joachim, who actually played the piece (he refused to touch the concerto). Like the late Concert Allegro with Introduction which Schumann began writing only three days after the Fantasie was finished, it’s a work whose thematic inspiration is pretty thin gruel, as is the working out of the basic material. Like Kopatchinskaja, pianist Alexander Lonquich does everything he can to invest his part with life and interest, though well before the Concert Allegro begins you realize why—after a certain point—the composer’s widow stopped playing it in public.

All concerned are on far firmer footing in the earlier Introduction and Allegro appassionato, written well before Schumann was beginning to lose his grip on things. Lonquich responds admirably to the work’s impetuosity and high romance, though not with quite the same magical fusion of freshness and knowing finesse Jan Lisiecki achieves in his recent recording with Antonio Pappano (DG 479 5327).

The orchestra’s horn section turns in a spectacular account of the op. 86 Konzertstück, which still gets recorded far more frequently than it’s actually performed, given that its often stratospheric writing for the first horn is an endless series of clams just waiting to happen. Holliger and the soloists’ colleagues give them rousing support, though the closing bars lack the visceral excitement of Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony’s madcap dash to the end (Naxos 8.572770).

Collectors of this fine series will have snatched up both installments by now; others can proceed with minimal caution, as anything Kopatchinskaja does these days is mandatory listening.

The fourth and fifth volumes of Audite’s Schumann series with Heinz Holliger and the West German Radio Symphony are in many ways the most fascinating so far and the toughest sell. The difficulty is obvious from a glance at the repertoire list: one masterpiece, one quasi-masterpiece, and four conspicuous examples of less than top-drawer Schumann.

The version of the Piano Concerto is all we’ve come to expect from this excellent series, including alert, rhythmically flexible playing from a first-class radio orchestra (people who play to microphones for a living), a conductor who knows his business in Schumann (a firm grasp of the long line, an ability to clarify the occasionally dense inner voicing, a total lack of fear when it comes to punching the telling accent, an uncanny knack for pointing out the previously overlooked—but deeply important—detail), together with superbly realistic recorded sound that nonetheless bathes everything in an early-Romantic glow. The young Hungarian pianist Dénes Várjon takes a wonderfully fresh and unaffected approach to this familiar music; while everything feels perfectly controlled, he bends the bar line in a way that recalls the great Schumann pianists of the past (Cortot and Rubinstein especially) but nothing feels willful or self-aggrandizing. If the finale lacks the head-long excitement of Fleisher, Janis, Richter, and others, then overall it’s an immensely satisfying outing that makes you want to hear some of the solo piano music from this source. (There’s already an excellent version of the violin sonatas with Carolin Widmann on ECM 1902 and an even finer recording of the cello music with Steven Isserlis on Hyperion 67661.)

Wild child Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s presence guarantees an immensely individual look at the problematic Violin Concerto, and, as usual, she doesn’t disappoint. From her first entrance, it’s a startlingly original interpretation, with a seemingly endless variety of tone color—insured by her endless types of vibrato—down to that chilling moment in the heart of the first movement where the line is so drained of life it sounds like someone keening at a funeral. (There are other moments where the sound is so intense at the lower range of audibility that you wonder if she heard of Leonard Bernstein’s extraordinary instruction to a string section: “Play triple piano, but use the kind of vibrato you use playing triple forte.”) Holliger adds as much point and thrust as he possibly can to the outer movements—especially the opening movement, which for once never seems to drag—and although the slow movement seems less a premature anticlimax than usual, things never quite add up (as they never quite have, at least on records).

Kopatchinskaja is just as committed and persuasive in the violin Fantasie, whose gypsy-like opening flourishes are a reminder that it was written for the Hungarian-born Joseph Joachim, who actually played the piece (he refused to touch the concerto). Like the late Concert Allegro with Introduction which Schumann began writing only three days after the Fantasie was finished, it’s a work whose thematic inspiration is pretty thin gruel, as is the working out of the basic material. Like Kopatchinskaja, pianist Alexander Lonquich does everything he can to invest his part with life and interest, though well before the Concert Allegro begins you realize why—after a certain point—the composer’s widow stopped playing it in public.

All concerned are on far firmer footing in the earlier Introduction and Allegro appassionato, written well before Schumann was beginning to lose his grip on things. Lonquich responds admirably to the work’s impetuosity and high romance, though not with quite the same magical fusion of freshness and knowing finesse Jan Lisiecki achieves in his recent recording with Antonio Pappano (DG 479 5327).

The orchestra’s horn section turns in a spectacular account of the op. 86 Konzertstück, which still gets recorded far more frequently than it’s actually performed, given that its often stratospheric writing for the first horn is an endless series of clams just waiting to happen. Holliger and the soloists’ colleagues give them rousing support, though the closing bars lack the visceral excitement of Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony’s madcap dash to the end (Naxos 8.572770).

Collectors of this fine series will have snatched up both installments by now; others can proceed with minimal caution, as anything Kopatchinskaja does these days is mandatory listening.

With this sixth and final volume in his series of the 'Complete Symphonic Works', Heinz Holliger mops up the remaining segment of Schumann's orchestral output. That's all six of his overtures: operatic (Genoveva), quasi-operatic (Faust Scenes), Shakespearean (Julius Caesar), Byronesque (Manfred) and German Romantic (Schiller's The Bride of Messina and a delightfully loopy response to Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea, complete with a plethora of piped renditions of the Marseilleise). To fill up the disc there's Schumann's first attempt at a symphony, the two movements of a work in G minor that's now most commonly known as the 'Zwickau' Symphony.

That makes Holliger's the most complete cycle of the orchestral works to have arrived in ages. Dausgaard's three single discs (BIS) took in all the symphonic works (including both versions of the Fourth Symphony) along with the six overtures, while Gardiner's triple-set, on period instruments, dispensed with the overtures but included the wonderful Konzertstück for four horns and orchestra. If and when Holliger's six full-price discs come out in a budget-price box, that'll make this easily one of the most attractive collections of this music.

For those less bothered about such notions of completeness, other attractions include Holliger's clear-sighted interpretations, revealed in sound that is focused without being over-analytical. Perhaps the youthful 'Zwickau' piece and the much later concert overtures can't boast the winning melodies that make the greatest of Schumann's works stand out but they display all the composer's motivic skills and his development of the Beethovenian model in his own Romantic language, and offer valuable alternative lights on his orchestral career.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja is typically bold and provocative in Schumann's Violin Concerto. Largely eschewing the full-blooded sonorities favoured by other soloists, she peppers the fiery passagework in the first movement with harsh accents, and produces a dogged and relentless tone in much of the Polonaise Finale. At the opposite end of the dynamic spectrum, lyrical phrases tail off to an almost inaudible whisper, and in the middle section of the first movement the tempo is so stretched that time almost seems to stand still. Some might find her approach too schizophrenic even for a composition that purportedly straddles the borderlines between sanity and madness. Where it works really well is in the slow movement, Kopatchinskaja exposing the fragility of Schumann's writing with heartrending sensitivity.

Heinz Holliger and the WDR Sinfonieorchester are responsive partners both in the Violin Concerto and its far less problematic counterpart for piano. This latter work is presented in a relatively straightforward manner by Dénes Várjon, who emphasises its playfulness and lightness of touch, especially in the slow movement and Finale.

Holliger is particularly good at bringing out light and shade in Schumann's orchestration and highlighting inner details. This clarity of texture is evident throughout the two Konzertstücke for piano Op. 92 and Op. 134, where Holliger matches Alexander Lonquich's muscular tone with powerfully driven orchestral tuttis. The Konzertstücke for four horns, magnificently executed by the orchestra's principals, also benefits from Holliger's insights, the irresistible exuberance of the outer movements contrasting with the mellifluous expressiveness achieved in the central Romanze. Less convincing is the Fantasie for violin and orchestra, composed in the same year as the Violin Concerto but less exalted. Kopatchinskaja shows considerable charismatic imagination in projecting the rustic features of the faster section, but makes a few slips of intonation.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja is typically bold and provocative in Schumann's Violin Concerto. Largely eschewing the full-blooded sonorities favoured by other soloists, she peppers the fiery passagework in the first movement with harsh accents, and produces a dogged and relentless tone in much of the Polonaise Finale. At the opposite end of the dynamic spectrum, lyrical phrases tail off to an almost inaudible whisper, and in the middle section of the first movement the tempo is so stretched that time almost seems to stand still. Some might find her approach too schizophrenic even for a composition that purportedly straddles the borderlines between sanity and madness. Where it works really well is in the slow movement, Kopatchinskaja exposing the fragility of Schumann's writing with heartrending sensitivity.

Heinz Holliger and the WDR Sinfonieorchester are responsive partners both in the Violin Concerto and its far less problematic counterpart for piano. This latter work is presented in a relatively straightforward manner by Dénes Várjon, who emphasises its playfulness and lightness of touch, especially in the slow movement and Finale.

Holliger is particularly good at bringing out light and shade in Schumann's orchestration and highlighting inner details. This clarity of texture is evident throughout the two Konzertstücke for piano Op. 92 and Op. 134, where Holliger matches Alexander Lonquich's muscular tone with powerfully driven orchestral tuttis. The Konzertstücke for four horns, magnificently executed by the orchestra's principals, also benefits from Holliger's insights, the irresistible exuberance of the outer movements contrasting with the mellifluous expressiveness achieved in the central Romanze. Less convincing is the Fantasie for violin and orchestra, composed in the same year as the Violin Concerto but less exalted. Kopatchinskaja shows considerable charismatic imagination in projecting the rustic features of the faster section, but makes a few slips of intonation.

Robert Schumann ist für den Schweizer Oboisten, Komponisten und Dirigenten Heinz Holliger mehr als eine Passion. Seit seiner Jugend ist er geradezu besessen von der musikalischen Welt des Romantikers. Er sei in jeder seiner eigenen Kompositionen präsent, gab er einmal zu. Als Dirigent aller Orchesterwerke von Schumann hat Holliger nun eine Reihe maßstäblicher CDs aufgenommen.

Die sechste und letzte Folge sämtlicher sinfonischer Werke von Schumann umfasst sechs Ouvertüren und die frühe so genannte "Zwickauer Sinfonie". Wie bei den vorangegangenen Teilen entfaltet sich auch hier eine fein abgestimmte Dramaturgie, die verschiedene Lebensphasen und Stoffe zu einem größeren Bild zusammenfügt. Schon in der vom 21-jährigen Schumann in mehreren Anläufen zu Papier gebrachten "Zwickauer Sinfonie" weht und zirkuliert ein unruhiger Geist. Die in den 1850er Jahren, und also als "spät" apostrophierten Ouvertüren lenken diesen Geist auf literarische Stoffe von Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller und Lord Byron. Aufruhr herrscht auch hier, aber doch in dramatische Form gegossen.

Schnelle Umschwünge

Dass die Ouvertüren heute kaum noch im Konzertleben anzutreffen sind, ist ein Manko des weniger auf klassische Bildung als auf Effekt zielenden Konzertbetriebs. Zumindest hat Heinz Holliger mit diesen Aufnahmen alle Vorurteile gegenüber einer groben Orchestrierung oder Gedankenschwäche bei Schumann gründlich widerlegt. Die Marseillaise in der Ouvertüre zu Goethes "Herrmann und Dorothea" ist nicht der einzige revolutionäre Ton, der hier immer wieder anklingt. Das Obsessive von Schumanns notorischen Motivdrehungen und –windungen schlägt hier Funken. Dabei sind die Tempi nirgends übertrieben schnell. Holliger strafft vor allem die Dynamik, die schnelle Umschwünge vollführen kann, ohne Nebenstimmen zuzudecken. Das WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln hat sich hier einen überraschend hellen Schumann-Ton erarbeitet, der fast kammermusikalisch erscheint.

Wenn diese CD mit den Fanfarentönen der "Julius Caesar"-Ouvertüre zu Ende geht, ist damit auch ein Aufnahmezyklus vollendet, der noch lange Bestand haben wird als einsichtige und Einsichten verschaffende Schumann-Gesamtschau.

Japanische Rezension siehe PDF!

Japanische Rezension siehe PDF!

Schumann’s Violin Concerto has one of the strangest histories of all great Romantic works. His last piece for orchestral forces, it was inspired by a meeting with the young Joseph Joachim in 1853. ‘May Beethoven’s example incite you, O wondrous guardian of the richest treasures,’ wrote the 22-year-old virtuoso, ‘to carve out a work from your deep quarry and bring something to light for us poor violinists.’

This coincided with a particularly stressful period in Schumann’s personal and professional life, not least the fallout from his deficiencies as a conductor with the Düsseldorf Musikverein. He was plagued by illness; but work on music for Joachim—two sonatas, the Phantasie, Op 131, and the Concerto—invigorated him and he remarked often on his ability to concentrate diligently on the music for his young new fiddler friend.
Joachim never performed the concerto, though. With Schumann’s decline and suicide attempt, the violinist considered the work to be ‘morbid’ and the product of a failing mind; he wrote that it betrayed ‘a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy’. This attitude evidently rubbed off on Clara and Brahms, who omitted it from the complete edition of Schumann’s works. Joachim retained the manuscript and bequeathed it to the Prussian State Library in Berlin upon his death in 1907, stating in his will that it should be neither played nor published until 1956, 100 years after Schumann’s death.

It was in 1933, however, that it came to light. This is where the story turns very peculiar. The violinist sisters Jelly d’Arányi and Adila Fachiri held a séance in which the shade of Schumann asked that they recover and perform a lost piece of his; then Joachim’s ghost handily popped up to mention that they might look in the Prussian State Library. A copy of the score was sent to Yehudi Menuhin, who pronounced it the ‘missing link’ in the violin literature between Beethoven and Brahms, and announced he would give its premiere in October 1937. D’Arányi claimed precedence on account of Schumann’s imprimatur (albeit from the other side), and the German State invoked their copyright on the work and demanded a German soloist have the honour. Georg Kulenkampff was eventually entrusted with the world premiere; Menuhin introduced it in the US and d’Arányi in the UK.
It’s long been considered a problematic work, owing partly to Joachim’s opinion of it, partly to some supposedly heavy scoring and partly to the awkward gait of the polonaise finale, which can too easily become a graveyard for dogged soloists. Nevertheless, it’s something of a rite of passage for recording violinists, and two of the finest present it on new discs, as Patricia Kopatchinskaja goes head-to-head with Thomas Zehetmair. Kopatchinskaja (with the Cologne WDR SO under Heinz Holliger in Vol 4 of his series of Schumann’s ‘Complete Symphonic Works’) displays the full range of sounds she is able to draw from her instrument, spinning something almost hallucinatory in the slow movement. The tone employed by Zehetmair (directing the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris) is more focused, more centred, as would appear to be his outlook on the work: all three movements are 40 seconds to a minute faster than Kopatchinskaja. Nevertheless, her concentration and imagination sustain the performance, and Holliger and his players follow her lead in creating some wondrous sounds, demonstrating yet again that Schumann’s orchestration isn’t as leaden as it’s often made out to be.

On first hearing, I wasn’t sure if I’d wish to revisit Kopatchinskaja’s disc in a hurry. But there’s something magnetic about her vision of the work, about the abandon with which she plays, never shunning an ugly tone when it’s called for. Zehetmair’s tidier, more dapper performance avoids such ugliness and makes choosing between the two an invidious choice. Holliger couples an energetic performance of the Piano Concerto with Dénes Várjon, incorporating in the first movement some features of the earlier Phantasie on which it was based, and which some might prefer to the self-conciously individual recent readings by Ingrid Fliter (reviewed on page 40) or Stephen Hough (Hyperion, 4/16). Zehetmair offers a lithe, spontaneous Spring Symphony and the fiddle Phantasie that Joachim did play.

Pat Kop also offers this latter work, on Vol 5 of Holliger’s series. Again, she takes a more spacious, more reactive approach than Zehetmair; elsewhere on the disc, Alexander Lonquich is similarly more inclined to let the music breathe in Schumann’s two single-movement concertante piano works than, say, the tauter Jan Lisiecki (DG, 1/16). The real draw here, though, is the Konzertstück for four horns and orchestra, in a performance that makes a truly joyful noise, even if it’s perhaps less sleek than Barenboim in Chicago or less steampunk than John Eliot Gardiner with a quartet of period piston horns.

These days, you’re as likely to find—on disc, at least—the Cello Concerto co-opted by violinists. Jean-Guihen Queyras returns it to the bass clef, though, completing the series of the three concertos and piano trios with Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra under Pablo Heras-Casado. Queyras gives the best possible case for the concerto, making a virtue of the relative short-windedness of period instruments but exploiting their greater ensemble clarity. Where the gut strings really tell, though, is in the First Piano Trio—especially at those points at which Schumann asks for new sounds, such as in the first-movement development, where he tells the string players to play at the bridge for an eerie, glassy sound. I’ve enjoyed all the discs in this series without necessarily preferring them to certain older (modern-instrument) favourites. The combination of Queyras’s concerto and the wonderful, driven D minor Trio, though, leads me to suspect that this is the most persuasive of the three.

Schumann’s Violin Concerto has one of the strangest histories of all great Romantic works. His last piece for orchestral forces, it was inspired by a meeting with the young Joseph Joachim in 1853. ‘May Beethoven’s example incite you, O wondrous guardian of the richest treasures,’ wrote the 22-year-old virtuoso, ‘to carve out a work from your deep quarry and bring something to light for us poor violinists.’

This coincided with a particularly stressful period in Schumann’s personal and professional life, not least the fallout from his deficiencies as a conductor with the Düsseldorf Musikverein. He was plagued by illness; but work on music for Joachim—two sonatas, the Phantasie, Op 131, and the Concerto—invigorated him and he remarked often on his ability to concentrate diligently on the music for his young new fiddler friend.
Joachim never performed the concerto, though. With Schumann’s decline and suicide attempt, the violinist considered the work to be ‘morbid’ and the product of a failing mind; he wrote that it betrayed ‘a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy’. This attitude evidently rubbed off on Clara and Brahms, who omitted it from the complete edition of Schumann’s works. Joachim retained the manuscript and bequeathed it to the Prussian State Library in Berlin upon his death in 1907, stating in his will that it should be neither played nor published until 1956, 100 years after Schumann’s death.

It was in 1933, however, that it came to light. This is where the story turns very peculiar. The violinist sisters Jelly d’Arányi and Adila Fachiri held a séance in which the shade of Schumann asked that they recover and perform a lost piece of his; then Joachim’s ghost handily popped up to mention that they might look in the Prussian State Library. A copy of the score was sent to Yehudi Menuhin, who pronounced it the ‘missing link’ in the violin literature between Beethoven and Brahms, and announced he would give its premiere in October 1937. D’Arányi claimed precedence on account of Schumann’s imprimatur (albeit from the other side), and the German State invoked their copyright on the work and demanded a German soloist have the honour. Georg Kulenkampff was eventually entrusted with the world premiere; Menuhin introduced it in the US and d’Arányi in the UK.
It’s long been considered a problematic work, owing partly to Joachim’s opinion of it, partly to some supposedly heavy scoring and partly to the awkward gait of the polonaise finale, which can too easily become a graveyard for dogged soloists. Nevertheless, it’s something of a rite of passage for recording violinists, and two of the finest present it on new discs, as Patricia Kopatchinskaja goes head-to-head with Thomas Zehetmair. Kopatchinskaja (with the Cologne WDR SO under Heinz Holliger in Vol 4 of his series of Schumann’s ‘Complete Symphonic Works’) displays the full range of sounds she is able to draw from her instrument, spinning something almost hallucinatory in the slow movement. The tone employed by Zehetmair (directing the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris) is more focused, more centred, as would appear to be his outlook on the work: all three movements are 40 seconds to a minute faster than Kopatchinskaja. Nevertheless, her concentration and imagination sustain the performance, and Holliger and his players follow her lead in creating some wondrous sounds, demonstrating yet again that Schumann’s orchestration isn’t as leaden as it’s often made out to be.

On first hearing, I wasn’t sure if I’d wish to revisit Kopatchinskaja’s disc in a hurry. But there’s something magnetic about her vision of the work, about the abandon with which she plays, never shunning an ugly tone when it’s called for. Zehetmair’s tidier, more dapper performance avoids such ugliness and makes choosing between the two an invidious choice. Holliger couples an energetic performance of the Piano Concerto with Dénes Várjon, incorporating in the first movement some features of the earlier Phantasie on which it was based, and which some might prefer to the self-conciously individual recent readings by Ingrid Fliter (reviewed on page 40) or Stephen Hough (Hyperion, 4/16). Zehetmair offers a lithe, spontaneous Spring Symphony and the fiddle Phantasie that Joachim did play.

Pat Kop also offers this latter work, on Vol 5 of Holliger’s series. Again, she takes a more spacious, more reactive approach than Zehetmair; elsewhere on the disc, Alexander Lonquich is similarly more inclined to let the music breathe in Schumann’s two single-movement concertante piano works than, say, the tauter Jan Lisiecki (DG, 1/16). The real draw here, though, is the Konzertstück for four horns and orchestra, in a performance that makes a truly joyful noise, even if it’s perhaps less sleek than Barenboim in Chicago or less steampunk than John Eliot Gardiner with a quartet of period piston horns.

These days, you’re as likely to find—on disc, at least—the Cello Concerto co-opted by violinists. Jean-Guihen Queyras returns it to the bass clef, though, completing the series of the three concertos and piano trios with Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra under Pablo Heras-Casado. Queyras gives the best possible case for the concerto, making a virtue of the relative short-windedness of period instruments but exploiting their greater ensemble clarity. Where the gut strings really tell, though, is in the First Piano Trio—especially at those points at which Schumann asks for new sounds, such as in the first-movement development, where he tells the string players to play at the bridge for an eerie, glassy sound. I’ve enjoyed all the discs in this series without necessarily preferring them to certain older (modern-instrument) favourites. The combination of Queyras’s concerto and the wonderful, driven D minor Trio, though, leads me to suspect that this is the most persuasive of the three.

Japanische Rezension siehe PDF!

Derzeit erlebt Schumanns Violinkonzert eine wahre Renaissance. Nach Isabelle Faust und Pablo Heras-Casado (harmonia mundi) bricht nun eine weitere CD für dieses Juwel eine Lanze, das sich jeder virtuosen Attitüde versagt. Heinz Holliger hatte im Rahmen seiner famosen Gesamteinspielung der Orchesterwerke Schumanns mit Patricia Kopatchinskaja eine höchst experimentierfreudige Solistin zur Seite, die dem Stück einen Klangreichtum entlockt, der staunen macht – bis hin zu Tönen, die fast schon am Erlöschen sind.

The first two discs in this ‘Complete Symphonic Works’ series (10/11, 11/11) were outstanding. This third is wholly exceptional. The presence of the overture In Autumn and the Old Norwegian Romance with Variations gives the programme a Beechamesque feel. But Aadland and his astonishingly well-integrated German ensemble – by this I mean that they are guided into a natural-sounding Nordic style – need fear nothing by way of competition, not even from the RPO’s dream woodwind section.

Aadland’s Romance – unlike Beecham’s it is complete and not marginally reorchestrated – becomes a kind of Norwegian Enigma Variations avant la lettre, mixing a large degree of symphonic seriousness with wit and Griegian nostalgia. The demonstration-class recording showcases a weight and colour of orchestration that puts this Grieg score in the correct but rarely considered position of contemporary to Strauss’s early orchestral masterworks. A piece that (sssh, even on the two Beecham recordings) can sound bloated and occasional claims a place here alongside, indeed anticipates, the disguised turn-of-the-century unnamed symphonies of Rachmaninov, Elgar and the like.

A similar seriousness but never overblown grandeur informs In Autumn. Aadland has already shown us in this cycle that he is good at correctly scaling miniatures both in joy and in grief. He seconds those achievements here in the characterisation of the Lyric Suite and the Sigurd Jorsalfar music, while the five minutes of Klokkeklang (‘Bell-ringing’) become a spooky shadow of the Bøyg’s music in Peer Gynt (eagerly awaited in this series). A compulsively playable record, hugely recommended.

Nach fast anderthalb Jahren setzt das Label audite seinen Schumann-Zyklus mit einer Doppelfolge fort. Aufgrund der Besetzung und der Werke fraglos ein Kraftakt für alle Beteiligten – doch mit einer anhaltenden Poesie verbunden, die einem Schumann, seine vielfach als problematisch eingeredete Instrumentation und sein Spätwerk näher als zuvor erscheinen lassen. War dies schon bei den Sinfonien und dem Cellokonzert zu erfahren, die Heinz Holliger ohne die seit über einem Jahrhundert gepflegten aufführungspraktischen Retuschen mühelos zu verblüffender Lebendigkeit erweckt hat, so stellen er und das WDR-Sinfonieorchester sich nun in den Dienst der übrigen konzertanten Werke.

Wie so oft erweist sich alles nur als eine Frage der Interpretation – von der Verständigkeit gegenüber dem Notentext über das aufmerksame Zusammenwirken bis hin zur passgenauen Artikulation und das rechte Tempo. In diesem Sinne gelingt es Holliger und seinen Solisten mit den Konzertstücken für Klavier op. 92 und op. 134 (Alexander Lonquich) sowie der Violin-Fantasie op. 131 tatsächlich zu überzeugen: Man hört einen Komponisten, dem das virtuose Element eigentümlich fremd und doch so nah war, dem am Ende aber der poetische Gedanke mehr zählte als jede leere Phrase. Hier begegnen sich über mehr als 150 Jahre hinweg die Komponisten Schumann und Holliger auf ästhetischer Ebene – der Dirigent Holliger aber weiß, wie auch der rechte Tonfall in einer klanglich agilen, in nahezu jedem Moment die Aufmerksamkeit bannenden Aufnahme festzuhalten ist. Umso mehr muss der stark aufgeraute, bisweilen kantige Zugriff von Patricia Kopatchinskaja im Violinkonzert verstören, der nicht gerade vor wohliger Wärme sprüht; das kühle Solo des langsamen Satzes lehrt einen gar das Frösteln. Daneben vermag Dénes Várjon im delikat angegangenen Klavierkonzert mit seinem eher vorsichtigen, keineswegs griffigen Forte nicht vollständig zu überzeugen.

Japanische Rezension siehe PDF!

Nach fast anderthalb Jahren setzt das Label audite seinen Schumann-Zyklus mit einer Doppelfolge fort. Aufgrund der Besetzung und der Werke fraglos ein Kraftakt für alle Beteiligten – doch mit einer anhaltenden Poesie verbunden, die einem Schumann, seine vielfach als problematisch eingeredete Instrumentation und sein Spätwerk näher als zuvor erscheinen lassen. War dies schon bei den Sinfonien und dem Cellokonzert zu erfahren, die Heinz Holliger ohne die seit über einem Jahrhundert gepflegten aufführungspraktischen Retuschen mühelos zu verblüffender Lebendigkeit erweckt hat, so stellen er und das WDR-Sinfonieorchester sich nun in den Dienst der übrigen konzertanten Werke.

Wie so oft erweist sich alles nur als eine Frage der Interpretation – von der Verständigkeit gegenüber dem Notentext über das aufmerksame Zusammenwirken bis hin zur passgenauen Artikulation und das rechte Tempo. In diesem Sinne gelingt es Holliger und seinen Solisten mit den Konzertstücken für Klavier op. 92 und op. 134 (Alexander Lonquich) sowie der Violin-Fantasie op. 131 tatsächlich zu überzeugen: Man hört einen Komponisten, dem das virtuose Element eigentümlich fremd und doch so nah war, dem am Ende aber der poetische Gedanke mehr zählte als jede leere Phrase. Hier begegnen sich über mehr als 150 Jahre hinweg die Komponisten Schumann und Holliger auf ästhetischer Ebene – der Dirigent Holliger aber weiß, wie auch der rechte Tonfall in einer klanglich agilen, in nahezu jedem Moment die Aufmerksamkeit bannenden Aufnahme festzuhalten ist. Umso mehr muss der stark aufgeraute, bisweilen kantige Zugriff von Patricia Kopatchinskaja im Violinkonzert verstören, der nicht gerade vor wohliger Wärme sprüht; das kühle Solo des langsamen Satzes lehrt einen gar das Frösteln. Daneben vermag Dénes Várjon im delikat angegangenen Klavierkonzert mit seinem eher vorsichtigen, keineswegs griffigen Forte nicht vollständig zu überzeugen.

Japanische Rezension siehe PDF!

This is volume five of Audite’s survey of the complete symphonic music of Edvard Grieg, and not surprisingly, it continues to delight with excellent performances and wonderful surprises from the corners of this great composer’s output (not to mention the very familiar Peer Gynt music). This edition features two works for orchestra and voice, including six songs for soprano, and one for baritone. The six orchestral songs are a grouping of early works with piano accompaniment that the composer orchestrated in Copenhagen in 1895. They are exceptionally beautiful, with, typically for Grieg, a strong folk influence. Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling sounds very much in her element here, with her light bodied, lyrical soprano capturing the mood of the music nicely. The song for baritone, Den Bergtekne (The Mountain Thrall) was written for orchestra and voice, the only such example in Grieg’s output, according to the program notes. Norwegian singer Tom Erik Lie renders the music with the gravity of a Schubert song. The two Lyric Pieces, as well as the Norwegian Dances, are also orchestrations of familiar piano music. The Lyric Pieces sound a bit overweight in this garb, but the Norwegian Dances, originally for piano four hands, translate well.

No surprises here as far as Aadland and his Cologne musicians are concerned, and that’s a good thing, because previous releases have also featured lusty, deeply committed performances. Great engineering from Audite, also as usual (and I am only hearing it in standard CD playback). This is a terrific series.

Japanische Rezension siehe PDF!

This series has been good except where there is formidable competition. This program is, by that standard, mixed. Certainly the Norwegian Dances here can’t compete with Jarvi on DG (Gothenburg Symphony). Note also that Grieg never orchestrated these dances; they were written for two pianos. The two pieces from Peer Gynt are available in complete recordings—just not in the suites. But most of one piece (Act I Prelude) is just ‘Solveig’s Song’ for orchestra, and we have that on dozens of recordings. The other piece takes less than 2 minutes. The Opus 68 Lyric Pieces are seldom heard in orchestrated form. The only Lyric Pieces that have been recorded often by orchestras are the Opus 54 set. (But there is a Naxos that has Opus 68: 572403.)

I don’t like ‘The Mountain Thrall’, a six-minute piece for baritone and orchestra.

That leaves the six orchestral songs. Three of them are familiar: the two Solveig songs from Peer Gynt and ‘The Last Spring’. To those are added ‘From Monte Pincio’, ‘A Swan’, and ‘Henrik Wergeland’. I know no better recording of the six songs, though of course there are better ones of the Solveig songs in sets of Peer Gynt. (Eileen Farrell did one of them with Fiedler.)

Tempos are slower than in any other recording I know. The singer never sounds “operatic” but has a sweet folk simplicity combined with a lovely, well-trained voice. There’s a Norwegian melancholy here that often fails to show up.

The six songs take 27 minutes (Inger Dam-Jensen on Naxos takes 24 minutes). Add the 8 minutes of the two Lyric Pieces, and there is 35 minutes of music here that can’t be beat elsewhere. Sound is excellent.

Bei seinem Violinkonzert, das Robert Schumann noch vor dem Fall in die geistige Umnachtung vollenden konnte, fühlen sich Geiger und Kommentatoren stets zu einer Art "Ehrenrettung " berufen. Patricia Kopatchinskaja tut das einzig Richtige und liefert eine geigerisch risikofreudige, entromantisierte Darstellung ab. Der Orchesterpart des d-moll-Werkes erscheint in überwiegend dunklen Farben, von Holliger in nicht allzu starke Dynamik getrieben. Hier wirkt auch die WDR-Tontechnik übertrieben verhalten. Im besten Sinne unaufdringlich und werkgerecht platziert sich Denes Varjon im oberen Mittelfeld der unzähligen Einspielungen des Klavierkonzerts.

Japanische Rezension siehe PDF!

Sendebeleg siehe PDF!

Ich habe mit Heinz Holliger als Dirigent nicht selten meine Schwierigkeiten. Gerade im romantischen Repertoire ist er mir oft zu kühl und zu analytisch. Seine Schumann-Aufnahmen bei Audite sind aber sehr gut gelungen. Im Vol. IV stehen das Violinkonzert und das Klavierkonzert auf dem Programm. Insbesondere das Violinkonzert mit Patricia Kopatchinskaya wird zu einem Erlebnis. Mit zügigen Tempi und einer herrlichen Phrasierungskunst überzeugt die Violinistin auf der ganzen Linie und macht aus dem schwarzen Schaf der Violinliteratur einen echten Renner.

Wie schon Isabelle Faust räumt auch Kopatchinskaya mit den Klischees auf und zeigt uns Schumanns Musik in einem sehr frischen und dynamischen Gewand. Holliger dirigiert erstaunlich musikantisch, verzichtet aber wie gewohnt auf zu starke romantische Exkurse. So stehen vor allem ein aktzentreiches und klares Musizieren im Vordergrund.
Mit dem gleichen Konzept geht Holliger auch das beliebte Klavierkonzert an. Genussvoll lässt er das hervorragend disponierte WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln aufspielen, sieht aber seinen Schumann auch hier durch eine strengere klassischere Brille. Was der Musik aber sehr gut tut. Dénes Varjon spielt das Konzert sehr virtuos und mit einer sehr deutlichen Artikulation. Ob man jetzt dieses eher unromantische Interpretationskonzept mag oder lieber die Werke in der klassischen Optik sieht sei einem jeden überlassen. Für mich jedenfalls kommt das Violinkonzert in der Interpretation Kopatchinskaya/Holliger sehr nahe an das Referenzniveau heran.

Vol V. präsentiert etwas weniger attraktive Werke. Hier sticht insbesondere das Konzertstück für vier Hörner ins Auge. Holliger und seine Solisten wollen von Jägerromantik nichts wissen und spielen das Stück äußerst präzise und klar. Der Wohlklang der Hörner ist zwar präsent, ist aber mehr das Resultat einer analytischen und architektonisch begründeten Interpretation als das einer rein atmosphärisch orientierten. Alexander Lonquich spielt die beiden Konzertstücke für Klavier und Orchester op. 92 & 114 mit schönem Ton und ausgewogenem Ausdruck, Kopatchinskaya ist in der Fantasie für Violine und Orchester wieder einmal überragend. Heinz Holliger kann diesen drei Werken deutlich weniger interessante Aspekte abgewinnen als dem Violinkonzert oder dem Klavierkonzert.

Heinz Holliger continues to explore Schumann’s symphonic works in a very clear and analytical way. The highlight of the CDs is the very fresh and vivid performance of the Violin Concerto.

Ich habe mit Heinz Holliger als Dirigent nicht selten meine Schwierigkeiten. Gerade im romantischen Repertoire ist er mir oft zu kühl und zu analytisch. Seine Schumann-Aufnahmen bei Audite sind aber sehr gut gelungen. Im Vol. IV stehen das Violinkonzert und das Klavierkonzert auf dem Programm. Insbesondere das Violinkonzert mit Patricia Kopatchinskaya wird zu einem Erlebnis. Mit zügigen Tempi und einer herrlichen Phrasierungskunst überzeugt die Violinistin auf der ganzen Linie und macht aus dem schwarzen Schaf der Violinliteratur einen echten Renner.

Wie schon Isabelle Faust räumt auch Kopatchinskaya mit den Klischees auf und zeigt uns Schumanns Musik in einem sehr frischen und dynamischen Gewand. Holliger dirigiert erstaunlich musikantisch, verzichtet aber wie gewohnt auf zu starke romantische Exkurse. So stehen vor allem ein aktzentreiches und klares Musizieren im Vordergrund.
Mit dem gleichen Konzept geht Holliger auch das beliebte Klavierkonzert an. Genussvoll lässt er das hervorragend disponierte WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln aufspielen, sieht aber seinen Schumann auch hier durch eine strengere klassischere Brille. Was der Musik aber sehr gut tut. Dénes Varjon spielt das Konzert sehr virtuos und mit einer sehr deutlichen Artikulation. Ob man jetzt dieses eher unromantische Interpretationskonzept mag oder lieber die Werke in der klassischen Optik sieht sei einem jeden überlassen. Für mich jedenfalls kommt das Violinkonzert in der Interpretation Kopatchinskaya/Holliger sehr nahe an das Referenzniveau heran.

Vol V. präsentiert etwas weniger attraktive Werke. Hier sticht insbesondere das Konzertstück für vier Hörner ins Auge. Holliger und seine Solisten wollen von Jägerromantik nichts wissen und spielen das Stück äußerst präzise und klar. Der Wohlklang der Hörner ist zwar präsent, ist aber mehr das Resultat einer analytischen und architektonisch begründeten Interpretation als das einer rein atmosphärisch orientierten. Alexander Lonquich spielt die beiden Konzertstücke für Klavier und Orchester op. 92 & 114 mit schönem Ton und ausgewogenem Ausdruck, Kopatchinskaya ist in der Fantasie für Violine und Orchester wieder einmal überragend. Heinz Holliger kann diesen drei Werken deutlich weniger interessante Aspekte abgewinnen als dem Violinkonzert oder dem Klavierkonzert.

Heinz Holliger continues to explore Schumann’s symphonic works in a very clear and analytical way. The highlight of the CDs is the very fresh and vivid performance of the Violin Concerto.

Sendebeleg siehe PDF!

Music that grapples with demons and is never wholly at ease, even when wings bless the darkness with glimpses of light – when you’re Robert Schumann, angels are terrifying too.

The symphonic models are clear and we hear the ghostly spectre of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Mendelssohn – but no one has told Schumann’s material that it needs to conform, and the music cannot help but spill over any frame its composer attempts to place around it. The first movement of his Symphony No 1 reaches an apparent cathartic end-point as a solo flute line marked dolce reconciles grinding harmonic and structural inner tensions. Time to stop this madness. But then brass, percussion and trilling woodwinds unleash a stampeding burlesque march. Baleful chromatic inclines smudge the harmony, like Offenbach or Sousa turned on their dark side, and such instability derives from the restlessness of Schumann’s mind, you think, rather than being an overtly conceptual compositional strategy.

The free jazz of the Second Symphony’s sostenuto assai prologue, C major credentials asserted by having the strings play anything but, as the brass sustain pure C major triads; in the Third Symphony, that extra movement that sneaks in before the finale, a cobwebby and gothic reimagining of the grounding contrapuntal principles of Renaissance music and Bach; and the audacious cyclic structure of the Fourth Symphony, each movement played attacca and dovetailing into the next. This music of demons and angels grapples also with angles – to take on structure, awkward punctuation, Schumann pushing form, his personal mission being to remould the symphony. And when the realisation dawns that Schumann composed the first version of what would become his Fourth Symphony in the same year as his First Symphony, eyes blink in astonishment. The natural order of things would be to presume that Schumann’s streamlined Fourth Symphony is a perfect distillation of the first three symphonies – but the pathway through Schumann’s symphonic journey is filled with unexpected and improbable twists and turns.

Deciding to record a cycle of the Schumann symphonies begs the question: what exactly should be recorded? And complementary but divergent ideas about the Schumann symphonies have been paraded as rarely before, with four major conductors during the past 18 months releasing four major cycles on disc. Sir Simon Rattle, with the Berlin Philharmonic, gives us four symphonies with the early 1841 version of the Fourth, while Yannick Nézet-Séguin (and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe) and Robin Ticciati (with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra) opt for Schumann’s 1851 revised version. But Heinz Holliger and the WDR Symphony Orchestra of Cologne – like Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, whose trailblazing 1997 Schumann cycle was given the boxed-up DG reissue treatment last year – perceive Schumann’s symphonic evolution in seven stages. When Holliger completes his cycle during the next year and a half, Schumann’s early Symphony in G minor (theZwickau Symphony) will take its place alongside the first three canonic symphonies, both versions of the Fourth, and the often-overlooked mini-me symphony Overture, Scherzo and Finale – Schumann’s compositional twists of fate put into historical context by a composer/conductor/oboist who has been obsessed with the composer’s enigma for more than 40 years.

I made Rattle’s cycle my Critics’ Choice album of the year in the December 2014 issue; I’ve also elevated Nézet-Séguin’s to an equivalent position in the past. Ticciati’s set has given me much pleasure too, and even more to think about. Nézet-Séguin and Ticciati deploy chamber-orchestra string sections, with Ticciati most explicitly evoking period-instrument practice. Rattle’s Berlin set carries its weightier orchestral ballast very elegantly, and his set became my portal back to Schumann after a longer period than I care to admit when my listening had been dominated by Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner. Rattle’s opulent, rapacious approach – the climax of the First Symphony’s opening movement and the Trio in the Second Symphony’s Scherzo seemingly moving faster than time itself, while the Berlin strings float the slow movement towards heaven – represented the warmest welcome back possible to Schumann’s dream-built chimeric fantasy world, the heartfelt directness of his melodic fancy played out over structural chess moves. Ticciati’s sometimes manically driven, flintier orchestral sound can be unexpectedly austere; Nézet-Séguin’s cycle is the most unashamedly Romantic of the four, fevered-brow gesturing, rubato with attitude.

Despite their differences, though, the sets are unified by one underlying common denominator – none of them could have been recorded 30, or even 20, years ago. Over the phone from his home in Zurich, Heinz Holliger suppresses a laugh when I ask: why now? Why, suddenly, have maestros gone all Schumann crazy? ‘Well, I started conducting him 30 years ago, when too many conductors had problems with Schumann,’ he reflects. ‘He was never a problem for pianists or composers – Debussy and Berg held him in great esteem – but conductors realised that you cannot try to sight-read Schumann; if you do, the music is completely grey.’ And even 50 shades of grey would not be enough to express Schumann’s multiverse of colour? ‘He does not write out everything; he doesn’t tell you which voice is the principal and which accompanies; nor whether one instrument should have a diminuendo while the others crescendo. To make a Schumann symphony sound light and transparent, as he intended, takes a lot of rehearsal. Each player needs to know whether they’re playing part of only the harmony, or whether they are involved in the counterpoint. Schumann was a great writer of words too, and you need to understand how close the phrasing is to speech. But many conductors are not so interested in this background; they just play what they read.’

Holliger reminds me that Schumann never heard more than 12 first violins during his whole life and, in his view, the period-instrument movement has had a very positive effect on how conductors perceive appropriate orchestral weighting and internal balance. And when I talk to Sir Simon Rattle a few weeks earlier, he makes a characteristically smart analogy: ‘We think of Beethoven and Brahms as being the grizzled old lions of Austro-German symphonic tradition,’ he tells me, ‘but Schumann’s symphonies move like a panther. Beethoven plunges his feet forcefully through the ground; but Schumann’s feet sprint and never fully touch the floor.’

Rattle can’t quite explain why Schumann is suddenly so de rigueur, although sometimes, he says, mysterious forces collude to raise the collective consciousness around a particular composer. But the important thing for Rattle is that distinct and informed conductorly perspectives must all be celebrated. Ticciati’s way is not his way, but Rattle admires enormously how he tackles the 1851 revision of the Fourth Symphony: ‘Robin makes a clear case for how the revised version can retain the radical edge of the 1841 version. Still it sounds like a fireball and I take my hat off to him.’

Which Fourth Symphony? That’s the most fundamental decision any wannabe Schumann conductor must make. To programme the 1841 version is to agree with Brahms, who owned the autograph score and wrote: ‘It is a real pleasure to see anything so bright and spontaneous expressed with corresponding ease and grace.’ He found the revised version charmless and stodgy, and Rattle and Holliger concur with Brahms, and each other, that the first version is much preferable – although they choose to do notably different things with that information. ‘Schumann made the revised piece in a depressive state,’ Rattle says, ‘and Brahms was completely right about the relative merits of the two versions.’ Holliger adds that Schumann’s orchestra in Düsseldorf, which premiered the new version, was nowhere near as honed as the standard of playing he had become accustomed to in Leipzig, while Schumann himself ‘was heavier, and moved and spoke more slowly’. But the pertinent point for Holliger is that Schumann retained his high-velocity metronome marks. Rattle chooses to ignore the later rewrite – Holliger gives us both but attempts to play the 1851 version, as he says, ‘retaining the true spirit of the earlier version’.

Holliger reminds me that he met Rattle 40 years ago when the young conductor invited him to perform Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. And Rattle clearly remains in awe of Holliger’s status as a Schumann guru – ‘Ask Heinz, when you speak to him, to tell you about the tempo relationships in the symphonies and about his extraordinary discovery in the fourth movement of the Rhenish Symphony.’ And I’m happy to take my cue from the Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic.

On paper, and in the mind, Schumann’s Second Symphony registers as the most conventionally ‘symphonic’, its four movement groundplan – with a slow introduction breaking into an Allegro trot – putting you in mind of the first two Beethoven symphonies or of Haydn. And as I began to reacquaint myself with Schumann’s symphonic world, I pondered how a composition that felt instinctively unified melodically and motivically could also sound so disparate and varied, like each movement acting as a standalone character piece (not that you would necessarily want that). Holliger provides an answer.

‘The first and second movements,’ he tells me, ‘have the same metronome mark of crotchet=144, and the slow movement is nearly half; then the finale is in a very fast one-beat-per-bar, but still you feel like each bar matches the beat of the slow movement. The whole symphony is in one, like the conception of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.’ Holliger explains how the music is glued together throughout by a four-note cell, but I ask him to tell me about the music’s disunity. Am I right to hear each movement orbiting independently too, in a way that is uniquely Schumann? Holliger alludes to Bernd Alois Zimmermann, the composer of Die Soldaten, Photoptosis and Requiem für einen jungen Dichter, who died in 1970, and who was famous for pieces that made liberal use of collage and knitted together layers of borrowed material. ‘He was fascinated by the idea of Kugelgestalt – that time is like a ball, and all times of all centuries are focused in one single point. I think Schumann understood this too. You ask about the Second Symphony – well, the beginning could be like 17th-century polyphony and then, suddenly, it looks 120 years or more into the future. You feel this composer knows the whole history of music.’

The Second Symphony’s Scherzo has something of the lightness of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Holliger explains as he tells me about those angels and demons, ‘but is relentless, a diabolic dance, in the mood of ETA Hoffmann’. And that shockingly abrupt change of mood, the solo flute overtaken by a brutal march as the first movement of the First Symphony reaches its climax, is another characteristic Schumann moment. ‘In the First Symphony the flute symbolises a butterfly which here is overwhelmed by very tragic music. Marches are a frightening thing. Send soldiers to kill, and you’re asking them to stop thinking about what they are doing. Trills in Schumann, like the woodwind trills you mention, often tremor and shiver like music with a high fever – this is not the Baroque idea of a trill as ornamentation.’

Holliger talks about the symbolism of instrumental identity in Schumann’s music. In Overture, Scherzo and Finale a choir of three trombones appear suddenly like a premonition of the role they will take in the fourth movement of the Rhenish. ‘When his brother Eduard was dying, Schumann woke up at three in the morning. He had been dreaming about three trombones, and later he learnt that his brother had died at 3am. Always in Schumann, three trombones is a message about death.’ I mention that Rattle urged me to ask him about this same movement. ‘Well, when I looked at the sketches, I realised that the tempo changes to double the speed two beats later than in the printed score – nobody ever does this, but the difference is essential.’

That Schumann had such specific ideas about orchestral colour and instrumental identity runs triumphantly contrary to that tired cliché about his orchestration being somehow inept and clumsy. In the September 2014 issue of Gramophone, Robin Ticciati revealed that, for him, the attraction of Schumann is precisely because the orchestration is so, as he put it, ‘crazy’. ‘It’s also so controlled, and the palette is extraordinary. And I think when you get to a Schumann score, the first reaction is not to go, “What is all that?” but “What does he want?” and “What’s important here?”’ Ticciati hears clues about how Schumann ought to sound orchestrally in how he ‘orchestrates’ his piano music; and in the booklet-notes accompanying his cycle, Yannick Nézet-Séguin discusses how the defined attack and decay of modern trumpets help balance the orchestration.

And so Schumann wins. The consensus, circa 2014/15, is leave well alone. ‘Schumann learnt lots about orchestration from Mendelssohn, the greatest orchestrator of his time,’ Holliger explains, ‘and he tried to have a very transparent sound in the orchestra. It’s not that very heavy “German potato soup” sound. I never change a single note in any of the symphonies.’ Rattle confirms that Schumann must be ‘light and singing, or the sound can be too brittle – the key word is sostenuto.’ The impulsive and spontaneous side of Schumann is also important to Rattle. ‘The last symphonic music Schumann wrote was the Rhenish,’ he says, ‘and the fourth movement feels like Schumann falling apart, then the finale is an attempt to cradle him in a warm embrace. And for that to work, you can’t micromanage too heavily.’ Music to Schumann’s ears, I suspect – a composer who clearly knew the value of spontaneity: ‘My symphonies would have reached Opus 100 if I had but written them down,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I am so full of music, and so overflowing with melody, that I find it simply impossible to write anything.’

Mit ganz so edlen Waffen wird auf der folgenden Aufnahme nicht gefochten, wo sich Camilla Tilling und Tom Erik Lie beim Grieg-Zyklus des Norwegers Eivind Aadland mit dem WDR-Sinfonieorchester ins Zeug legen. Mit der fünften Ausgabe gehen die Complete Symphonic Works mit der Einspielung von weniger bekannten Orchesterliedern effektvoll ins Ziel (audite 92.671). Die Sechs Orchesterlieder von 1894/95 beispielsweise fassen u.a. mit zwei Solveig-Weisen Auszüge aus der Schauspielmusik zu „Peer Gynt“ sowie Bearbeitungen von Klavierliedern – darunter „From Monte Pincio“ oder das dem norwegischen Patrioten und Dichter Wergeland gewidmete Lied – zusammen. Tilling glänzt vor allem im fast wagnerischen „Letzter Frühling“. Mitbringsel von Griegs Sommer-Aufenthalten in Hardanger sind neben den Orchesterbearbeitungen der Lyrischen Stücke für Klavier mit „Abend im Hochgebirge“ und „Wiegenleid“ die stark volkstümlich gefärbten Norwegischen Tänze op. 35 und die stimmungsvolle Orchesterballade für Bariton „Den Bergtekne“, was Michael Struck-Schloen im schönen dt. engl. Beiheft als „Der durch den Berg Entrückte“ wiedergibt. Beiheft (dt., engl.). Das WDR-Sinfonieorchester sorgt u.a. mit erhabenen Holzbläser-Passagen dafür, dass der Hörer sich eine gute Stunde lang in norwegische Landschaften entrückt fühlen darf.

Sometimes you open up an innocent looking CD and discover a box of treasures. That’s what this one is like. Not having listened to any Grieg for a little while, I was pleased enough to come across this recording but it turns out to be full of truly wonderful things. Plenty of variety too, with short orchestral works, incidental music, and songs with orchestra.

It’s these last – the songs – that lie at the heart of this collection, and bring its most memorable experiences. The soprano Camilla Tilling is a rare talent, and is to be heard at her best in this Scandinavian repertoire. I first heard her in a fine CD of Strauss songs with piano, and was struck then with the freshness of her tone, the open, natural manner of her singing. That is again the case here, perhaps enhanced by the character of the Norwegian language though she herself is Swedish.

All the songs are sung with great beauty and an unsentimental strength of emotion. Solveig’s Song from Peer Gynt is famously affecting, but I can’t remember hearing it sung as perfectly as this. A Swan, to Henrik Ibsen’s poem, is hauntingly elegiac, while The Last Spring achieves a remarkable intensity. Tilling has the ability to sing this often subtle and demanding music as if it comes straight from the heart, which I’m sure it does.

All through these songs, she is accompanied with the greatest sensitivity by Eivind Aadland and the WDR Symphony Orchestra. They are equally engaged for Tom Erik Lie’s singing of The Mountain Thrall – the only Grieg song that was originally set for voice and orchestra. Matters of balance have been most carefully addressed by the performers, and the excellence of the recording simply facilitates that.

The first two tracks are items taken from the music Grieg wrote for Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt. Neither of these is to be heard in the familiar suites; we have the Act 1 Prelude, quite an extended piece that incorporates Solveig’s Song, while the second is the sensual Dance of the Mountain King’s Daughter, with its Arabic colouring. The whole programme, which could have been a little disparate, is given a satisfying shape by ‘book-ending’ it with orchestral items, the final four tracks being the delightful Norwegian Dances of op.35. Again I was struck here by the very fine orchestral playing. The first Dance - which brings us Grieg in his ‘Mountain King’ mode evoking wicked dwarves and trolls - fairly rattles along, while the oboe playing in no.2 (Allegro tranquillo e grazioso) is beautifully phrased and full of gentle wit. The same characteristics are to be found in the two Lyric Pieces on tracks 9 and 10. I was particularly taken with Evening in the Mountains, an atmospheric and moody little piece, that brings us an oboe ‘ranz des vaches’ reminiscent of the cor anglais solo in Tristan, followed by yet another example of Grieg’s unsurpassed wiring for strings.

All in all, a disc of the highest quality. Grieg is a composer that it’s far too easy to take for granted, and to think no further than the Peer Gynt Suites and the Piano Concerto. There is an awful lot more to him than that, and this CD, Volume 5 of a ‘Complete Symphonic Works’ project, demonstrates that in the most enjoyable way possible.

Was im Juni 2011 mit der ersten von insgesamt fünf Einspielungen des gesamten sinfonischen Werks von Edvard Grieg mit dem WDR-Sinfonieorchester unter der Leitung des Norwegers Eivind Aadland begann, ist nun vollendet. Die die Gesamteinspielung abschließende, soeben erschienene fünfte CD, stellt den Liedkomponisten und Bearbeiter Grieg in den Mittelpunkt.

Immer wieder hat er sich leidenschaftlich gegen den Vorwurf der "Norwegerei" gewehrt – doch die Werke dieser CD belegen eindrucksvoll, dass Edvard Grieg sich seines Bekenntnisses zu seiner norwegischen Heimat, zu deren Klang, Atmosphäre, zu deren elegischem Naturmythos alles andere als schämen musste. Denn was Grieg uns in seiner Musik zu Ibsens "Peer Gynt", seinen Norwegischen Tänzen op. 35, den zwei lyrischen Stücken op. 68 und insbesondere in seinem Zyklus "Sechs Lieder für Orchester" hinterlassen hat, ist der Beleg eines Komponisten, der die Instrumentationsraffinessen der Spätromantik bravourös einzusetzen wusste. Umso wertvoller, dass wir sie nun in einer mustergültigen Edition vollständig vorliegen haben.

Aadland als Natur- und Seelenführer

Das WDR Sinfonieorchester schlägt unter Eivind Aadland genau den richtigen Ton an, den es braucht, um Griegs Heimat akustisch erlebbar werden zu lassen. Einen besseren Natur- und Seelenführer als den Norweger Aadland hätte sich das Orchester nicht wünschen können. Aadland weiß genau, wovon die Musik erzählt. Und so lässt er sie an langer Leine ebenso ausgelassen feiern, mit wachem Ohr für die burschikose Heiterkeit vieler volksmusikalischer Elemente, wie er auch die überwältigenden Eindrücke einer sich auf die Berge legenden Abendstimmung mit majestätischem Staunen zu Gehör bringt. Aadlands Grieg ist kraftvoll, jedes Motiv ist bis ins Detail ausgelotet, bis ins letzte geschliffen und fügt sich doch wie selbstverständlich in einen in jedem Moment spürbaren Blick für die Gesamtform ein.

Atemberaubende Klanglandschaften

Wälder, Berge, Fjorde – Edvard Grieg hat Norwegens grandiose Landschaften in atemberaubende Klanglandschaften verwandelt. Ja, es sind manch elegische, lyrische, träumerisch-versonnene Momente in dieser Musik, so, als ob sich sanfte Nebelschwaden über die Natur legen – aber von welcher Schönheit! Und gerade, wenn sich die Musik über Worte legt und diese vom goldwarmen Klang der Sopranistin Camilla Tilling zu leuchten beginnen.

Griegsche Orchesterkosmos

Über vier Jahre haben sich das WDR Sinfonieorchester und Eivind Aadland auf das orchestrale Gesamtwerk Edvard Griegs konzentriert. Sicher, eine neue Gesamteinspielung der Symphonien von Beethoven, Brahms oder Bruckner mag spektakulärer klingen – aber auch diese fünfte und letzte Grieg-CD beweist: Es lohnt sich den Blick zu weiten, auch zu einem Komponisten, der musikalisch viel mehr Sprachen sprach, als "nur" die norwegische. Mit dieser exemplarischen Einspielung kommt man an der Vielsprachigkeit des Griegschen Orchesterkosmos endgültig nicht mehr vorbei. "Norwegischer" geht nicht!

Sendebeleg siehe PDF!

Mit diesem Album beschließt Audite die fünfteilige Gesamtaufnahme aller Orchesterwerke des norwegischen Nationalkomponisten. Die CD beginnt mit zwei Nummern aus der Bühnenmusik (nicht aus den Suiten) zu Henrik Ibsens Drama ‘Peer Gynt’ und endet mit den ‘Norwegischen Tänzen’ op. 35, die das WDR-Orchester hinreißend spielt, völlig gelöst und mit genuinem Schwung.

Grandioser Höhepunkt der CD sind die ‘Sechs Orchesterlieder’, weil mit Camilla Tilling und Eivind Aadland zwei Musiker aufeinandergetroffen sind, die dem elegischen Zyklus die Klangwelt verleihen, die er braucht, um den Zuhörer zu fesseln.

Mit ihrer kräftigen und doch so überaus sensiblen Stimme sowie ihrem so herzerweichend schönen, goldenen Timbre bleibt die schwedische Sängerin weder den verinnerlichten Gefühlen noch der leidenschaftlichen Dramatik etwas schuldig. In Aadland hat sie einen Dirigenten, der ihre Stimme trägt, der mit ihr atmet und der selber die Musik von innen heraus expressiv werden lässt. Deshalb gelingen ihm auch die beiden Lyrischen Stücke op. 68 so wunderbar einfühlsam.

Ganz bewegend ist ebenfalls ‘Der Bergentrückte’ (auch ‘Der Einsame’ genannt), den Tom Erik Lie gefühlvoll und mit angenehmer Stimme singt.

Kein Zweifel mit dieser CD setzt Audite seinem Grieg-Zyklus die Krone auf.

This final CD in Audite’s Grieg series has a lot of well performed content, yet the highlight is the cycle of Six Orchestral Songs, beautifully and movingly sung by Camilla Tilling, whose voice is perfectly supported by the orchestra.

This is Volume 3 of Schumann’s complete Symphonic Works on Audite.
These two works make a nice combination, since they share a formal structure that connects the movements in a subtle and satisfying way. Both are in minor keys and share a depth of feeling that make them two favorites of mine.
These performances are not the grandest I have heard. Shevlin is a fine cellist, principal in this orchestra since 1998. He gives a friendly, sensitive reading of this great concerto. Holliger conducts that and the symphony with style, taking all the repeats in the symphony. I sometimes wish that both works were treated with a little more grandeur, but they are richly recorded.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about these performances. But I’m afraid sympathy is in order—for the continuing tendency of German orchestras to inflict HIP revisionists upon themselves. The RSO Stuttgart was eccentric enough a few years ago, recording Elgar with what sounded like a string section assembled at Williams-Sonoma. That was Roger Norrington’s not very convincing take on history. Now, in Schumann’s Cologne, we waste the talents of the WDR on a perversely reduced “expanded version” of the Fourth Symphony.

About a year ago, I had more favorable things to say about Heinz Holliger’s CD of the “Spring” Symphony and early version of the Fourth. He seemed to bring a joyous bounce to the fanfares in the young work, and his foreshortening of things went well with notions of impetuous ardor. Similarly, the early Fourth, whose holes in orchestration are the aural equivalent of Swiss cheese, benefitted from a tight and virtuosic zest, clipping virtually everything to its benefit. It sounded demoted to piano suite status—but brought off well. Small consolation for admirers of original versions….

The CD here records the 1850 revision and expansion of the score. Schumann’s reworking fleshes out all the gaps which existed earlier and encourages grand, blazing, and sweeping phrases. In the right performance, the work lands nearly within reach of the Brahms Second Symphony in terms of impact—27 years before the fact. But in the wrong hands?

The performance here is perversely scrawny and metallic on top, tubby on the bottom from an uninspired timpanist, and discombobulated beyond prediction. Every phrase is too short, in a sort of Baroque manner, except for the ones which should be short. Every syncopation seems to have its own syncopation. And worse, there is considerable energy, only it never soars. Such electricity as there is, is wasted on aggression. It is like being rabbit-punched by Handel.

One of the persistent and poorly supported ideas about the Mendelssohn/Schumann era is the notion that these composers only experienced small orchestras. Even if this were true, it wouldn’t mean composers were necessarily happy with the resources before them. Schumann and Mendelssohn were friends and participated in numerous music festivals together during the 1840s. I don’t imagine the early music purists like to be reminded that the orchestras were enormous. The premieres of Paulus and Elijah had orchestras of 176 and 172 musicians respectively. Berlioz managed to conduct the Fantastique at the Crystal Palace with 150 (and his score demands 250). I cannot quote similar chapter and verse about Schumann, but he was well aware that music was getting really “big” and probably had conducted his own symphonies with large orchestras.

I shouldn’t fail to mention the cello concerto, the other late work included on this CD. It is always fascinating structurally, demonstrating how powerful an example the influence of Mendelssohn, in general and his violin concerto, in particular, had been. One could argue, though, that the themes are not so memorable as they should be, nor the textures sufficiently varied. Without the lively finale, the piece would languish away from the repertory. I refreshed my ears for this review with the Jacqueline du Pré performance and was struck by how alive, beautiful, and somehow sweepingly “upward” her phrasing manner always was. Oren Shevlin is the principal cellist of the Cologne orchestra and an accurate and musicianly player. But his manner is far too even. It doesn’t help that the orchestra avoids vibrato. This is the Schumann Concerto on Sominex.

I cannot really recommend the CD, despite good sound and scholarly notes. Schumann’s music is surely somewhere to be found between Handel’s Water Music and the Delius Cello Concerto. But Holliger’s HIP divining rod didn’t work.

Music that grapples with demons and is never wholly at ease, even when wings bless the darkness with glimpses of light—when you’re Robert Schumann, angels are terrifying too.

The symphonic models are clear and we hear the ghostly spectre of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Mendelssohn—but no one has told Schumann’s material that it needs to conform, and the music cannot help but spill over any frame its composer attempts to place around it. The first movement of his Symphony No 1 reaches an apparent cathartic end-point as a solo flute line marked dolce reconciles grinding harmonic and structural inner tensions. Time to stop this madness. But then brass, percussion and trilling woodwinds unleash a stampeding burlesque march. Baleful chromatic inclines smudge the harmony, like Offenbach or Sousa turned on their dark side, and such instability derives from the restlessness of Schumann’s mind, you think, rather than being an overtly conceptual compositional strategy. The free jazz of the Second Symphony’s sostenuto assai prologue, C major credentials asserted by having the strings play anything but, as the brass sustain pure C major triads; in the Third Symphony, that extra movement that sneaks in before the finale, a cobwebby and gothic reimagining of the grounding contrapuntal principles of Renaissance music and Bach; and the audacious cyclic structure of the Fourth Symphony, each movement played attacca and dovetailing into the next. This music of demons and angels grapples also with angles—to take on structure, awkward punctuation, Schumann pushing form, his personal mission being to remould the symphony. And when the realisation dawns that Schumann composed the first version of what would become his Fourth Symphony in the same year as his First Symphony, eyes blink in astonishment. The natural order of things would be to presume that Schumann’s streamlined Fourth Symphony is a perfect distillation of the first three symphonies—but the pathway through Schumann’s symphonic journey is filled with unexpected and improbable twists and turns.

Deciding to record a cycle of the Schumann symphonies begs the question: what exactly should be recorded? And complementary but divergent ideas about the Schumann symphonies have been paraded as rarely before, with four major conductors during the past 18 months releasing four major cycles on disc. Sir Simon Rattle, with the Berlin Philharmonic, gives us four symphonies with the early 1841 version of the Fourth, while Yannick Nézet-Séguin (and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe) and Robin Ticciati (with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra) opt for Schumann’s 1851 revised version. But Heinz Holliger and the WDR Symphony Orchestra of Cologne—like Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, whose trailblazing 1997 Schumann cycle was given the boxed-up DG reissue treatment last year—perceive Schumann’s symphonic evolution in seven stages. When Holliger completes his cycle during the next year and a half, Schumann’s early Symphony in G minor (the Zwickau Symphony) will take its place alongside the first three canonic symphonies, both versions of the Fourth, and the oftenoverlooked mini-me symphony Overture, Scherzo and Finale—Schumann’s compositional twists of fate put into historical context by a composer/conductor/oboist who has been obsessed with the composer’s enigma for more than 40 years.
I made Rattle’s cycle my Critics’ Choice album of the year in the December 2014 issue; I’ve also elevated Nézet-Séguin’s to an equivalent position in the past. Ticciati’s set has given me much pleasure too, and even more to think about. Nézet-Séguin and Ticciati deploy chamber-orchestra string sections, with Ticciati most explicitly evoking period-instrument practice. Rattle’s Berlin set carries its weightier orchestral ballast very elegantly, and his set became my portal back to Schumann after a longer period than I care to admit when my listening had been dominated by Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner. Rattle’s opulent, rapacious approach—the climax of the First Symphony’s opening movement and the Trio in the Second Symphony’s Scherzo seemingly moving faster than time itself, while the Berlin strings float the slow movement towards heaven—represented the warmest welcome back possible to Schumann’s dream-built chimeric fantasy world, the heartfelt directness of his melodic fancy played out over structural chess moves. Ticciati’s sometimes manically driven, flintier orchestral sound can be unexpectedly austere; Nézet-Séguin’s cycle is the most unashamedly Romantic of the four, fevered-brow gesturing, rubato with attitude.
Despite their differences, though, the sets are unified by one underlying common denominator—none of them could have been recorded 30, or even 20, years ago. Over the phone from his home in Zurich, Heinz Holliger suppresses a laugh when I ask: why now? Why, suddenly, have maestros gone all Schumann crazy? ‘Well, I started conducting him 30 years ago, when too many conductors had problems with Schumann,’ he reflects. ‘He was never a problem for pianists or composers—Debussy and Berg held him in great esteem—but conductors realised that you cannot try to sight-read Schumann; if you do, the music is completely grey.’ And even 50 shades of grey would not be enough to express Schumann’s multiverse of colour? ‘He does not write out everything; he doesn’t tell you which voice is the principal and which accompanies; nor whether one instrument should have a diminuendo while the others crescendo. To make a Schumann symphony sound light and transparent, as he intended, takes a lot of rehearsal. Each player needs to know whether they’re playing part of only the harmony, or whether they are involved in the counterpoint. Schumann was a great writer of words too, and you need to understand how close the phrasing is to speech. But many conductors are not so interested in this background; they just play what they read.’

Holliger reminds me that Schumann never heard more than 12 first violins during his whole life and, in his view, the period-instrument movement has had a very positive effect on how conductors perceive appropriate orchestral weighting and internal balance. And when I talk to Sir Simon Rattle a few weeks earlier, he makes a characteristically smart analogy: ‘We think of Beethoven and Brahms as being the grizzled old lions of Austro-German symphonic tradition,’ he tells me, ‘but Schumann’s symphonies move like a panther. Beethoven plunges his feet forcefully through the ground; but Schumann’s feet sprint and never fully touch the floor.’

Rattle can’t quite explain why Schumann is suddenly so de rigueur, although sometimes, he says, mysterious forces collude to raise the collective consciousness around a particular composer. But the important thing for Rattle is that distinct and informed conductorly perspectives must all be celebrated. Ticciati’s way is not his way, but Rattle admires enormously how he tackles the 1851 revision of the Fourth Symphony: ‘Robin makes a clear case for how the revised version can retain the radical edge of the 1841 version. Still it sounds like a fireball and I take my hat off to him.’

Which Fourth Symphony? That’s the most fundamental decision any wannabe Schumann conductor must make. To programme the 1841 version is to agree with Brahms, who owned the autograph score and wrote: ‘It is a real pleasure to see anything so bright and spontaneous expressed with corresponding ease and grace.’ He found the revised version charmless and stodgy, and Rattle and Holliger concur with Brahms, and each other, that the first version is much preferable—although they choose to do notably different things with that information. ‘Schumann made the revised piece in a depressive state,’ Rattle says, ‘and Brahms was completely right about the relative merits of the two versions.’ Holliger adds that Schumann’s orchestra in Düsseldorf, which premiered the new version, was nowhere near as honed as the standard of playing he had become accustomed to in Leipzig, while Schumann himself ‘was heavier, and moved and spoke more slowly’. But the pertinent point for Holliger is that Schumann retained his high-velocity metronome marks. Rattle chooses to ignore the later rewrite—Holliger gives us both but attempts to play the 1851 version, as he says, ‘retaining the true spirit of the earlier version’.
Holliger reminds me that he met Rattle 40 years ago when the young conductor invited him to perform Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. And Rattle clearly remains in awe of Holliger’s status as a Schumann guru—‘Ask Heinz, when you speak to him, to tell you about the tempo relationships in the symphonies and about his extraordinary discovery in the fourth movement of the Rhenish Symphony.’ And I’m happy to take my cue from the Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic.
On paper, and in the mind, Schumann’s Second Symphony registers as the most conventionally ‘symphonic’, its four movement groundplan—with a slow introduction breaking into an Allegro trot—putting you in mind of the first two Beethoven symphonies or of Haydn. And as I began to reacquaint myself with Schumann’s symphonic world, I pondered how a composition that felt instinctively unified melodically and motivically could also sound so disparate and varied, like each movement acting as a standalone character piece (not that you would necessarily want that). Holliger provides an answer.

‘The first and second movements,’ he tells me, ‘have the same metronome mark of crotchet=144, and the slow movement is nearly half; then the finale is in a very fast one-beat-per-bar, but still you feel like each bar matches the beat of the slow movement. The whole symphony is in one, like the conception of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.’ Holliger explains how the music is glued together throughout by a four-note cell, but I ask him to tell me about the music’s disunity. Am I right to hear each movement orbiting independently too, in a way that is uniquely Schumann? Holliger alludes to Bernd Alois Zimmermann, the composer of Die Soldaten, Photoptosis and Requiem für einen jungen Dichter, who died in 1970, and who was famous for pieces that made liberal use of collage and knitted together layers of borrowed material. ‘He was fascinated by the idea of Kugelgestalt—that time is like a ball, and all times of all centuries are focused in one single point. I think Schumann understood this too. You ask about the Second Symphony—well, the beginning could be like 17thcentury polyphony and then, suddenly, it looks 120 years or more into the future. You feel this composer knows the whole history of music.’

The Second Symphony’s Scherzo has something of the lightness of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Holliger explains as he tells me about those angels and demons, ‘but is relentless, a diabolic dance, in the mood of ETA Hoffmann’. And that shockingly abrupt change of mood, the solo flute overtaken by a brutal march as the first movement of the First Symphony reaches its climax, is another characteristic Schumann moment. ‘In the First Symphony the flute symbolises a butterfly which here is overwhelmed by very tragic music. Marches are a frightening thing. Send soldiers to kill, and you’re asking them to stop thinking about what they are doing. Trills in Schumann, like the woodwind trills you mention, often tremor and shiver like music with a high fever—this is not the Baroque idea of a trill as ornamentation.’
Holliger talks about the symbolism of instrumental identity in Schumann’s music. In Overture, Scherzo and Finale a choir of three trombones appear suddenly like a premonition of the role they will take in the fourth movement of the Rhenish. ‘When his brother Eduard was dying, Schumann woke up at three in the morning. He had been dreaming about three trombones, and later he learnt that his brother had died at 3am. Always in Schumann, three trombones is a message about death.’ I mention that Rattle urged me to ask him about this same movement. ‘Well, when I looked at the sketches, I realised that the tempo changes to double the speed two beats later than in the printed score—nobody ever does this, but the difference is essential.’
That Schumann had such specific ideas about orchestral colour and instrumental identity runs triumphantly contrary to that tired cliché about his orchestration being somehow inept and clumsy. In the September 2014 issue of Gramophone, Robin Ticciati revealed that, for him, the attraction of Schumann is precisely because the orchestration is so, as he put it, ‘crazy’. ‘It’s also so controlled, and the palette is extraordinary. And I think when you get to a Schumann score, the first reaction is not to go, “What is all that?” but “What does he want?” and “What’s important here?”’ Ticciati hears clues about how Schumann ought to sound orchestrally in how he ‘orchestrates’ his piano music; and in the booklet-notes accompanying his cycle, Yannick NézetSéguin discusses how the defined attack and decay of modern trumpets help balance the orchestration.

And so Schumann wins. The consensus, circa 2014/15, is leave well alone. ‘Schumann learnt lots about orchestration from Mendelssohn, the greatest orchestrator of his time,’ Holliger explains, ‘and he tried to have a very transparent sound in the orchestra. It’s not that very heavy “German potato soup” sound. I never change a single note in any of the symphonies.’ Rattle confirms that Schumann must be ‘light and singing, or the sound can be too brittle—the key word is sostenuto.’ The impulsive and spontaneous side of Schumann is also important to Rattle. ‘The last symphonic music Schumann wrote was the Rhenish,’ he says, ‘and the fourth movement feels like Schumann falling apart, then the finale is an attempt to cradle him in a warm embrace. And for that to work, you can’t micromanage too heavily.’ Music to Schumann’s ears, I suspect—a composer who clearly knew the value of spontaneity: ‘My symphonies would have reached Opus 100 if I had but written them down,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I am so full of music, and so overflowing with melody, that I find it simply impossible to write anything.’

Music that grapples with demons and is never wholly at ease, even when wings bless the darkness with glimpses of light—when you’re Robert Schumann, angels are terrifying too.

The symphonic models are clear and we hear the ghostly spectre of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Mendelssohn—but no one has told Schumann’s material that it needs to conform, and the music cannot help but spill over any frame its composer attempts to place around it. The first movement of his Symphony No 1 reaches an apparent cathartic end-point as a solo flute line marked dolce reconciles grinding harmonic and structural inner tensions. Time to stop this madness. But then brass, percussion and trilling woodwinds unleash a stampeding burlesque march. Baleful chromatic inclines smudge the harmony, like Offenbach or Sousa turned on their dark side, and such instability derives from the restlessness of Schumann’s mind, you think, rather than being an overtly conceptual compositional strategy. The free jazz of the Second Symphony’s sostenuto assai prologue, C major credentials asserted by having the strings play anything but, as the brass sustain pure C major triads; in the Third Symphony, that extra movement that sneaks in before the finale, a cobwebby and gothic reimagining of the grounding contrapuntal principles of Renaissance music and Bach; and the audacious cyclic structure of the Fourth Symphony, each movement played attacca and dovetailing into the next. This music of demons and angels grapples also with angles—to take on structure, awkward punctuation, Schumann pushing form, his personal mission being to remould the symphony. And when the realisation dawns that Schumann composed the first version of what would become his Fourth Symphony in the same year as his First Symphony, eyes blink in astonishment. The natural order of things would be to presume that Schumann’s streamlined Fourth Symphony is a perfect distillation of the first three symphonies—but the pathway through Schumann’s symphonic journey is filled with unexpected and improbable twists and turns.

Deciding to record a cycle of the Schumann symphonies begs the question: what exactly should be recorded? And complementary but divergent ideas about the Schumann symphonies have been paraded as rarely before, with four major conductors during the past 18 months releasing four major cycles on disc. Sir Simon Rattle, with the Berlin Philharmonic, gives us four symphonies with the early 1841 version of the Fourth, while Yannick Nézet-Séguin (and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe) and Robin Ticciati (with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra) opt for Schumann’s 1851 revised version. But Heinz Holliger and the WDR Symphony Orchestra of Cologne—like Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, whose trailblazing 1997 Schumann cycle was given the boxed-up DG reissue treatment last year—perceive Schumann’s symphonic evolution in seven stages. When Holliger completes his cycle during the next year and a half, Schumann’s early Symphony in G minor (the Zwickau Symphony) will take its place alongside the first three canonic symphonies, both versions of the Fourth, and the oftenoverlooked mini-me symphony Overture, Scherzo and Finale—Schumann’s compositional twists of fate put into historical context by a composer/conductor/oboist who has been obsessed with the composer’s enigma for more than 40 years.
I made Rattle’s cycle my Critics’ Choice album of the year in the December 2014 issue; I’ve also elevated Nézet-Séguin’s to an equivalent position in the past. Ticciati’s set has given me much pleasure too, and even more to think about. Nézet-Séguin and Ticciati deploy chamber-orchestra string sections, with Ticciati most explicitly evoking period-instrument practice. Rattle’s Berlin set carries its weightier orchestral ballast very elegantly, and his set became my portal back to Schumann after a longer period than I care to admit when my listening had been dominated by Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner. Rattle’s opulent, rapacious approach—the climax of the First Symphony’s opening movement and the Trio in the Second Symphony’s Scherzo seemingly moving faster than time itself, while the Berlin strings float the slow movement towards heaven—represented the warmest welcome back possible to Schumann’s dream-built chimeric fantasy world, the heartfelt directness of his melodic fancy played out over structural chess moves. Ticciati’s sometimes manically driven, flintier orchestral sound can be unexpectedly austere; Nézet-Séguin’s cycle is the most unashamedly Romantic of the four, fevered-brow gesturing, rubato with attitude.
Despite their differences, though, the sets are unified by one underlying common denominator—none of them could have been recorded 30, or even 20, years ago. Over the phone from his home in Zurich, Heinz Holliger suppresses a laugh when I ask: why now? Why, suddenly, have maestros gone all Schumann crazy? ‘Well, I started conducting him 30 years ago, when too many conductors had problems with Schumann,’ he reflects. ‘He was never a problem for pianists or composers—Debussy and Berg held him in great esteem—but conductors realised that you cannot try to sight-read Schumann; if you do, the music is completely grey.’ And even 50 shades of grey would not be enough to express Schumann’s multiverse of colour? ‘He does not write out everything; he doesn’t tell you which voice is the principal and which accompanies; nor whether one instrument should have a diminuendo while the others crescendo. To make a Schumann symphony sound light and transparent, as he intended, takes a lot of rehearsal. Each player needs to know whether they’re playing part of only the harmony, or whether they are involved in the counterpoint. Schumann was a great writer of words too, and you need to understand how close the phrasing is to speech. But many conductors are not so interested in this background; they just play what they read.’

Holliger reminds me that Schumann never heard more than 12 first violins during his whole life and, in his view, the period-instrument movement has had a very positive effect on how conductors perceive appropriate orchestral weighting and internal balance. And when I talk to Sir Simon Rattle a few weeks earlier, he makes a characteristically smart analogy: ‘We think of Beethoven and Brahms as being the grizzled old lions of Austro-German symphonic tradition,’ he tells me, ‘but Schumann’s symphonies move like a panther. Beethoven plunges his feet forcefully through the ground; but Schumann’s feet sprint and never fully touch the floor.’

Rattle can’t quite explain why Schumann is suddenly so de rigueur, although sometimes, he says, mysterious forces collude to raise the collective consciousness around a particular composer. But the important thing for Rattle is that distinct and informed conductorly perspectives must all be celebrated. Ticciati’s way is not his way, but Rattle admires enormously how he tackles the 1851 revision of the Fourth Symphony: ‘Robin makes a clear case for how the revised version can retain the radical edge of the 1841 version. Still it sounds like a fireball and I take my hat off to him.’

Which Fourth Symphony? That’s the most fundamental decision any wannabe Schumann conductor must make. To programme the 1841 version is to agree with Brahms, who owned the autograph score and wrote: ‘It is a real pleasure to see anything so bright and spontaneous expressed with corresponding ease and grace.’ He found the revised version charmless and stodgy, and Rattle and Holliger concur with Brahms, and each other, that the first version is much preferable—although they choose to do notably different things with that information. ‘Schumann made the revised piece in a depressive state,’ Rattle says, ‘and Brahms was completely right about the relative merits of the two versions.’ Holliger adds that Schumann’s orchestra in Düsseldorf, which premiered the new version, was nowhere near as honed as the standard of playing he had become accustomed to in Leipzig, while Schumann himself ‘was heavier, and moved and spoke more slowly’. But the pertinent point for Holliger is that Schumann retained his high-velocity metronome marks. Rattle chooses to ignore the later rewrite—Holliger gives us both but attempts to play the 1851 version, as he says, ‘retaining the true spirit of the earlier version’.
Holliger reminds me that he met Rattle 40 years ago when the young conductor invited him to perform Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. And Rattle clearly remains in awe of Holliger’s status as a Schumann guru—‘Ask Heinz, when you speak to him, to tell you about the tempo relationships in the symphonies and about his extraordinary discovery in the fourth movement of the Rhenish Symphony.’ And I’m happy to take my cue from the Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic.
On paper, and in the mind, Schumann’s Second Symphony registers as the most conventionally ‘symphonic’, its four movement groundplan—with a slow introduction breaking into an Allegro trot—putting you in mind of the first two Beethoven symphonies or of Haydn. And as I began to reacquaint myself with Schumann’s symphonic world, I pondered how a composition that felt instinctively unified melodically and motivically could also sound so disparate and varied, like each movement acting as a standalone character piece (not that you would necessarily want that). Holliger provides an answer.

‘The first and second movements,’ he tells me, ‘have the same metronome mark of crotchet=144, and the slow movement is nearly half; then the finale is in a very fast one-beat-per-bar, but still you feel like each bar matches the beat of the slow movement. The whole symphony is in one, like the conception of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.’ Holliger explains how the music is glued together throughout by a four-note cell, but I ask him to tell me about the music’s disunity. Am I right to hear each movement orbiting independently too, in a way that is uniquely Schumann? Holliger alludes to Bernd Alois Zimmermann, the composer of Die Soldaten, Photoptosis and Requiem für einen jungen Dichter, who died in 1970, and who was famous for pieces that made liberal use of collage and knitted together layers of borrowed material. ‘He was fascinated by the idea of Kugelgestalt—that time is like a ball, and all times of all centuries are focused in one single point. I think Schumann understood this too. You ask about the Second Symphony—well, the beginning could be like 17thcentury polyphony and then, suddenly, it looks 120 years or more into the future. You feel this composer knows the whole history of music.’

The Second Symphony’s Scherzo has something of the lightness of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Holliger explains as he tells me about those angels and demons, ‘but is relentless, a diabolic dance, in the mood of ETA Hoffmann’. And that shockingly abrupt change of mood, the solo flute overtaken by a brutal march as the first movement of the First Symphony reaches its climax, is another characteristic Schumann moment. ‘In the First Symphony the flute symbolises a butterfly which here is overwhelmed by very tragic music. Marches are a frightening thing. Send soldiers to kill, and you’re asking them to stop thinking about what they are doing. Trills in Schumann, like the woodwind trills you mention, often tremor and shiver like music with a high fever—this is not the Baroque idea of a trill as ornamentation.’
Holliger talks about the symbolism of instrumental identity in Schumann’s music. In Overture, Scherzo and Finale a choir of three trombones appear suddenly like a premonition of the role they will take in the fourth movement of the Rhenish. ‘When his brother Eduard was dying, Schumann woke up at three in the morning. He had been dreaming about three trombones, and later he learnt that his brother had died at 3am. Always in Schumann, three trombones is a message about death.’ I mention that Rattle urged me to ask him about this same movement. ‘Well, when I looked at the sketches, I realised that the tempo changes to double the speed two beats later than in the printed score—nobody ever does this, but the difference is essential.’
That Schumann had such specific ideas about orchestral colour and instrumental identity runs triumphantly contrary to that tired cliché about his orchestration being somehow inept and clumsy. In the September 2014 issue of Gramophone, Robin Ticciati revealed that, for him, the attraction of Schumann is precisely because the orchestration is so, as he put it, ‘crazy’. ‘It’s also so controlled, and the palette is extraordinary. And I think when you get to a Schumann score, the first reaction is not to go, “What is all that?” but “What does he want?” and “What’s important here?”’ Ticciati hears clues about how Schumann ought to sound orchestrally in how he ‘orchestrates’ his piano music; and in the booklet-notes accompanying his cycle, Yannick NézetSéguin discusses how the defined attack and decay of modern trumpets help balance the orchestration.

And so Schumann wins. The consensus, circa 2014/15, is leave well alone. ‘Schumann learnt lots about orchestration from Mendelssohn, the greatest orchestrator of his time,’ Holliger explains, ‘and he tried to have a very transparent sound in the orchestra. It’s not that very heavy “German potato soup” sound. I never change a single note in any of the symphonies.’ Rattle confirms that Schumann must be ‘light and singing, or the sound can be too brittle—the key word is sostenuto.’ The impulsive and spontaneous side of Schumann is also important to Rattle. ‘The last symphonic music Schumann wrote was the Rhenish,’ he says, ‘and the fourth movement feels like Schumann falling apart, then the finale is an attempt to cradle him in a warm embrace. And for that to work, you can’t micromanage too heavily.’ Music to Schumann’s ears, I suspect—a composer who clearly knew the value of spontaneity: ‘My symphonies would have reached Opus 100 if I had but written them down,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I am so full of music, and so overflowing with melody, that I find it simply impossible to write anything.’

With this third volume completing Audite's cycle of Schumann's symphonic works, Heinz Holliger couples the Cello Concerto to the revised version of what is in many ways the most remarkable of the four symphonies, the Fourth (Volumes 1 and 2 were reviewed in January and October 2014). Unusually, the revision was something that caused disagreement between Brahms and Clara Schumann, Brahms thinking that the second version, which sets out to clarify and emphasizes a very original form, was 'too heavily draped' in the revised orchestration, going so far as to attribute that to what he frankly called the 'bad' ('schlecht') Düsseldorf orchestra with which Schumann had to contend. Without rehearsing all the arguments, the inclusion of both versions in the Audite set may be commended, and certainly a case made out for what is a stronger form in the version preferred by Clara (there is discussion of this in Volume of what are thorough and helpful insert notes).

It is still not an easy work to perform, and Holliger does admirably here, not only in seeing to it that details of orchestration are made clear but that the virtually singlemovement form, cyclic in its use of repeated main material, works well. He is also entirely justified in being flexible with tempos. Not only is this in keeping with the approach to tempo defended by most mid-nineteenth century German composer-conductors, Weber and Wagner prime among them, with this symphony it can help to express the overall form more lucidly. The Romanze in particular is most beautifully played (though the violin solo is surprisingly reticent); but Holliger also keeps the orchestra well balanced and lively in the outer movements, or rather sections, of the work. At the same time, he successfully moves the music across from the brooding opening to the strong, affirmative ending. The Cello Concerto is a much more problematic piece, also difficult to bring off. Oren Shevlin does well with the many passages when the cello is bustling away rather unrewardingly against the orchestra; he is clearly relieved to reach the central Langsam, when Schumann is much more recognizably himself with a song-like movement in which his own melodic genius as well as the powers of the cello are more freely released.

japanische Rezension siehe PDF!

Deuxième étape (cf n° 622 pour le Volume 1) de ce qui s'impose comme un des cycles Schumann majeurs des années récentes. Il n'en a pourtant pas manqué, pour des résultats parfois totalement opposés - Venzago versus Dausgaard, par exemple. Une approche volontaire, pensée une nouvelle fois par Heinz Holliger en accordant une confiance totale à l'orchestre schumannien. Mais avec une agilité et une clarté chambristes, une fièvre disciplinée, un allègement général qui dès le Sostenuto assai de la Symphonie n° 2 modifient la perception habituelle.

Ruptures, surprises, exaltations, ivresse: il y a tout cela dans l'Allegro ma non troppo qui s'y enchaîne (on les retrouvera dans l'Allegro molto vivace final). Reposant sur un art des contrastes et une recherche d'équilibre très élaborés, il dégage un paysage sonore plus précis et varié à la fois, plus aéré que dans les gravures « romantiques » usuelles (brahmsiennes, en vérité: la contagion s'est opérée à rebours), créant ainsi une autre poétique. Le Scherzo revient à des origines classiques, allègres, dansantes, l'Adagio espressivo est étranger à tout pathos. On aime le grand geste processionnel auquel certains s'abandonnent ici – Leopold Stokowski, par exemple. Mais on admire tout autant, dans une esthétique et des moyens ô combien éloignés, le dialogue différencié, la légèreté et la fraîcheur que Holliger obtient d'un orchestre très réactif... sans d'ailleurs renoncer à une certaine élégance (la noblesse vraie de la fin du dernier mouvement).

La « Rhénane » confirme ce rééquilibrage au profit des bois, cordes agiles et dégraissées, effectif resserré. Ce n'est plus le Rhin à son plus large et majestueux, mais à sa source, jaillissant, changeant. Les Lebhaft remontent ainsi aux sources du romantisme. Un sourire imprègne le Scherzo (écoutez bien les bois, et l'évidence des équilibres), le Nicht Schnell devient une rêverie intime mais toujours allante. Et la proximité d'approche du Feierlich avec l'Adagio de la Symphonie n° 2 est frappante. Une magnifique réussite.

Die Musik Robert Schumanns spielt eine entscheidende Rolle im Kosmos Heinz Holligers. Immer wieder hat sich Holliger in seinen Kompositionen konkret mit der Klang- und Ausdruckswelt Schumanns auseinandergesetzt, und da liegt es nahe, dass er auch als Dirigent dem großen Romantiker seinen Tribut zollt. Bei der vorliegenden CD handelt es sich um die dritte Folge eines Schumann-Zyklus, den Holliger mit dem WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln zu realisieren im Begriff ist.

Die tiefe Verbundenheit des Oboisten, Komponisten und Dirigenten mit der Schumann'schen Tonsprache zeigt sich in einer angenehm entspannten, unaufgeregten Art und Weise. Ohne dass Holliger auf Temporekorde oder ein betont aufgerautes Klangbild aus ist, schafft er es, Vorurteile über Schumanns angeblich so ungeschickte Orchestrierungen sozusagen aus dem Handgelenk heraus vom Tisch zu wischen. Die Mehrsätzigkeit innerhalb eines quasi einsätzigen Satzgebildes, wie sie die Zweitfassung der vierten Sinfonie prägt, realisiert Holliger mit imponierender formaler Übersicht, und es zeigt sich zudem, dass zur Schaffung eines transparenten Klangbildes nicht unbedingt ein Originalklang-Ensemble zu nötig ist.

Passend dazu erklingt das Cellokonzert – mit Oren Shevlin – als vorwiegend lyrische Komposition, in der die Solostimme mit feinem Ton und unaufdringlicher Virtuosität gestaltet ist. Schumanns sinfonisches Schaffen hat in letzter Zeit viele Neueinspielungen erlebt, doch der Holliger-Zyklus dürfte einen der vorderen Ränge einnehmen.

Selten hatte man das Gefühl, ein Dirigent könnte einem Komponisten so in den Kopf schauen wie Heinz Holliger Robert Schumann.

An intimate account of the Cello Concerto from Oren Shevlin is tellingly offset by the Fourth Symphony’s high drama, meticulously paced by Heinz Holliger.

The Mantovani-style fanned chords at the start of Arthur H Lilienthal's all-strings rewrite of the Cello Concerto does not augur well, though Raphael Wallfisch rises from his freshly retextured orchestral bed determined not to allow the missing wind lines with their absent acerbities to compromise the strength of Schumann's message. He offers a convincing performance, phrasing with warmth and agility, while at the transition into the slow movement (at the start of tr 2) he achieves an affecting level of poignancy. But compare the close of the movement with Oren Shevlin's recording of Schumann's original with the Cologne WDR Symphony under Heinz Holliger, where the sting of brass and rocketing winds intensify the drama, and you soon realise what's missing in Lilienthal's rewrite, even though the arrangement was prompted by Schumann's own unrealised plan to prepare a version for string quintet. Had he done so I rather suspect it would have involved a certain amount of re-composition, not the blanket softening that we have here. And good as Wallfisch is, Shevlin suggests more of the fragile resolve that underlies the piece, fighting the dying light in a way that only Schumann could. Shevlin's tone is more subtly variegated than Wallfisch's, while his attack in the finale is toughened and springy. Holliger too keeps things stripped to the bone, sweetening the line where necessary, though never to excess, and with a level of clarity that others aim for but achieve only at a price of compromised expressivity. As to rivals, among older recordings I would especially recommend Janos Starker's Cologne version under Rafael Kubelik, recently issued by Orfeo as part of a three-disc Kubelik collection (all first-release material), probably the best we've had from Starker, simultaneously tender-hearted and tough-grained.

Most of Wallfisch's Schumann extras with piano are nicely done, the Fünf Stücke im Volkston delivered in the main with a light touch both by Wallfisch and by his fine pianist John York, the Three Romances, Op 94, and the Op 73 Fantasy Pieces similarly eloquent in a relaxed, unassuming way (barring the fiery last movement of Op 73), the Adagio and Allegro, Op 70, in many respects the disc's highlight. I wasn't too keen on the two Lieder transcriptions (both taken from the Op 39 Liederkreis collection), certainly not the start of 'Mondnacht', where the cello's presence spoils the music's solitary atmosphere, and in 'Frühlingsnacht', where the soloist ideally needs to project with greater presence.

Holliger's account of the 1851 Fourth Symphony has all the qualities that make his accompaniment to the Cello Concerto so distinctive, namely flow, transparency, and character (note the subtle but dramatic diminuendo among the horns at 4'42"). The expressive Romanze follows close on the heels of the first movement, surely as it should, the Scherzo asserts a virile presence, while the fast-paced finale is breezy and exhilarating, with plenty of light and shade. Altogether a worthy continuation of Holliger's Schumann series, with excellent playing and well-balanced sound.

These are light and airy performances, with Oren Shevlin a poignant and intensely lyrical soloist in the Cello Concerto, while Holliger's pacing of the Fourth Symphony feels entirely natural.

Selten hatte man das Gefühl, ein Dirigent könnte einem Komponisten so in den Kopf schauen wie Heinz Holliger Robert Schumann.

Holliger brings amazing textural clarity to the composer's orchestration without ever sacrificing the expressive Intensity of the musical argument. The Cologne orchestra responds superbly with beautifully nuanced playing.

As an instrumentalist (oboe) Holliger’s Schumann discography dates back to 1981. In the role of conductor here, he’s scaled the orchestra back to a size which the composer would have known, in order to refute the old canard about opaque scoring in the four symphonies (this Audite cycle will include both versions of No. 4). The ‘Rhenish’ is marginally the stronger performance, as there’s more tenderness in No. 2 than Holliger acknowledges. His positive manner is to secure incisive, clean playing from all departments and to drive the music forwards (not at unreasonable speeds) with no fussy ‘interventionism’.

Heinz Holliger's cycle of Schumann's symphonic works continues in Volume 2 (the first was reviewed in January) with Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3, preserving the rather Iighter approach he cultivates compared with that of many distinguished interpreters. There is much to be said for this. In the first place, it confronts head-on the charge of Schumann's poor orchestration, which continues to dog him. It is an ancient one, going back at least to Mahler, whose own beutifully lucid orchestration is in the line of Weber and Berlioz rather than what Schumann had in mind (those who want to hear what Mahler did for, or to, Schumann, may be interested in Riccardo Chailly's set of the symphonies). Perhaps Schumann's orchestration really did seem of 'incredible clumsiness' to the original conductor of the first two symphonies, Mendelssohn, as Donald Tovey surmises in the course of several paragraphs in his essay on the First Symphony, referring to listeners who have 'tried to hear Schumann's orchestra in its native fog'. But Schumann had an orchestra with a substantially smaller body of strings, and time and again it has been shown, as by John EIiot Gardiner, that a conductor following this practice, and with a careful ear to balance, can make Schumann's orchestra sound as if it is doing the job of presenting the musical ideas well, which is its purpose. Hans Gál, in many ways the successor to Tovey as Edinburgh's musical sage, and a man with deep understanding of the German musical tradition, wrote of the opening of the Third Symphony that, 'the conductor has to keep a thick quilt of harmony, that covers and dampens the soaring tune, under strict control, and let the melody flow with a large phrasing, free from narrow bar accents to give it the sweeping swing it demands'.

This kind of scrupulousness guides Holliger's performances, together with a naturally light touch in style that suits the works well, and does not treat them as if Brahms had already arrived upon the German scene. He does not take the opening of the Second Symphony too majestically, playing it quite brightly, which suits a movement in which the themes are not developmental but dangerously repetitious. The Scherzo is played swiftly, but with a certain eeriness in the main scherzo, which expresses it well: the swift, apparently dancing theme is actually based on a discord (the ubiquitous Romantic chord of spookiness, the diminished seventh), and the more lyrical elements must lie, as in this performance, with the two Trios which Schumann provides as its counter. The Adagio is marked by length of melodic line in the wind, led by a beautifully played oboe (as no doubt Holliger, one of the great oboists of his time, would have appreciated). Both with this Symphony's finale and that of the other Symphony here, the 'Rhenish', matters are kept bright and quite swift-moving, no attempt being made at a grand climatic summing up.

The Rhine Symphony itself is vividly presented, with the Ländler of the second movement absorbed into the work's Iyrical elements, as is suggested by the movement's intricate treatment of it, rather than played as a splash of local colour; and the movement, really an interlude, is gracefully and elegantly handled. The are problems for the interpreter in the fourth movement, marked feierlich ('solemn' or 'ceremonial'), with its subtle invocations (as Gál again points out) of the length of tradition manifest in the Rhine's great cathedral at Cologne, with motives that have ecclesiastical associations and even of Bach himself, no Rhinelander but a figure in whose shadow so much stood.

These are intelligent interpretations, decently recorded, original but drawing their nature from what lies to be found in the music itself.

Rob Cowan reviewed the first volume of Heinz Holliger's Schumann symphony cycle last December and concluded that, as it continued, this 'may well be the one to go for'. Since then, however, we've had sets of the four symphonies (with one or other version of the Fourth) from Yannick Nezet-Seguin, Simon Rattle and Robin Ticciati, joining other recent contenders including Fabio Luisi, Paavo Jarvi and Thomas Dausgaard. If these are indeed blessed times for Schumannistas, the water isn't being made any less muddy.

In the Second, Holliger demurs from the darkness-to-light trajectory divined by Ticciati and perhaps views the work as primarily derived from a Beethovenian aesthetic rather than a Mendelssohnian one, the notable intensity of the opening movement yielding to a businesslike central pair and a finale that feels more episodic than needs be. It's a similar story in the Rhenish: the 'Cologne Cathedral' movement is amply monumental but short on the mystery distilled by Nezet-Seguin or Ticciati, and again the first movement is the best, if not as ideally detailed as other recent readings.

In its favour, this disc is beautifully recorded, the woodwind favoured just a degree over the strings, allowing their solos to sing out. Brass, too, are given their head, which is especially important in both these works. The WDR SO is a full-size Romantic orchestra with slightly reduced strings for these performances, as opposed to the chamber bands that are increasingly claiming this music as their own; so the direct comparison is to Rattle, sumptuous-sounding if hampered by certain mannerisms, as against Holliger's coolness. You pays your money and you takes your choice: Holliger's cycle will ultimately be on three full-price SACDs, whereas many of the smaller-scale (and commensurately more athletic) performances come in handily priced two-disc slimline packs. Regular readers will already know where my preferences lie.

Japanische Rezension siehe PDF!

Diese CD mit dem Violoncellokonzert und der zweiten Fassung der d-Moll-Symphonie ist die m.E. bislang attraktivste aus der Holliger-Gesamtaufnahme. Die federleichte Symphonie die, wie vorgeschrieben, ‘lebhaft’ ist, ist dabei nicht einmal das Außergewöhnliche, denn so fein und wohl gefirmt hat man sie schon oft gehört. Das Faszinierende ist das Cellokonzert, das Oren Shevlin in den beiden ersten Sätzen mit subtiler Delikatesse und einer großen Zärtlichkeit spielt. Kein Showspiel ist das, sondern ein kammermusikalisch angegangenes Interpretieren, aus dem ein Klang vergeistigter Schönheit und Biegsamkeit zu einem beseelten Ausdruck führt. Mit der ergreifenden Innigkeit seines Spiels ist Shevlin so manchem seiner viel berühmteren Kollegen weit überlegen. Auch dem verspielten Finalsatz bleibt er mit einem unforciert lebhaften Spiel nichts schuldig.

Besides a very lively Fourth Symphony in its second version, this CD contains an absolutely fascinating performance of the Cello Concerto. Oren Shevlin, the Fist Cellist of the WDR Orchestra, plays with great delicacy and tenderness, affectionate beauty, thus giving the music an overwhelmingly intimate character.

There’s no special price for the Audite recording but, at $12.02 – just over £7 at current rates – it won’t break the bank and it’s well worth considering if you’re in the market for just these two symphonies. Tempi are a shade faster throughout than on Linn, especially in the third movement of No. 2 (8:26 against 10:13) and the opening movement of the Rhenish (8:58 against 9:37). The former is marked adagio espressivo and most take that to indicate a timing of a little over 10 minutes – Sawallisch takes 10:18 – but Heinz Holliger makes his faster tempo seem perfectly natural and unhurried. The opening movement of the Rhenish, marked lebhaft, certainly benefits from the faster treatment: Sawallisch is even a shade faster at 8:55, though, surprisingly, the speed-merchant Szell takes longer at 9:13. It seems that Szell was not such a speedy Gonzalez in this work as I recall – in fact, TH’s review in 1963 comments on the comparatively spacious speed in the second movement: at 6:15 he’s slower than Holliger (5:40) or Ticciati (6:02). I like the way that Holliger keeps the music moving here without seeming hurried; listening to Szell again, in lossless sound via Qobuz, I now think he’s inclined to make the movement sound a little arthritic and Sawallisch at 6:42 seems impossibly slow after hearing Holliger. So much for cherished benchmarks: of those that I mentioned at the outset, only Kubelík, at an ideal compromise of 6:08, holds up here.

The Audite recording is good throughout, though I miss those powerful drum thwacks, so apparent on the Linn recording. If you bought the first volume (Audite 97.677, Symphony No. 1 and No. 4, original version, and Overture, Scherzo and Finale) I’m sure you’ll want the second. The third volume, containing the Cello Concerto and final version of the Fourth Symphony, is due for release in October 2014.

I should add that I haven’t yet heard the new, highly-regarded BPO/Simon Rattle set – review – except for the 1-minute segments from Qobuz, but I see that he attributes his appreciation of Schumann to a meeting long ago with Heinz Holliger, whom he describes as a Schumann ‘nut’ – endorsement of a kind for his mentor’s new recording.

There’s no special price for the Audite recording but, at $12.02 – just over £7 at current rates – it won’t break the bank and it’s well worth considering if you’re in the market for just these two symphonies. Tempi are a shade faster throughout than on Linn, especially in the third movement of No. 2 (8:26 against 10:13) and the opening movement of the Rhenish (8:58 against 9:37). The former is marked adagio espressivo and most take that to indicate a timing of a little over 10 minutes – Sawallisch takes 10:18 – but Heinz Holliger makes his faster tempo seem perfectly natural and unhurried. The opening movement of the Rhenish, marked lebhaft, certainly benefits from the faster treatment: Sawallisch is even a shade faster at 8:55, though, surprisingly, the speed-merchant Szell takes longer at 9:13. It seems that Szell was not such a speedy Gonzalez in this work as I recall – in fact, TH’s review in 1963 comments on the comparatively spacious speed in the second movement: at 6:15 he’s slower than Holliger (5:40) or Ticciati (6:02). I like the way that Holliger keeps the music moving here without seeming hurried; listening to Szell again, in lossless sound via Qobuz, I now think he’s inclined to make the movement sound a little arthritic and Sawallisch at 6:42 seems impossibly slow after hearing Holliger. So much for cherished benchmarks: of those that I mentioned at the outset, only Kubelík, at an ideal compromise of 6:08, holds up here.

The Audite recording is good throughout, though I miss those powerful drum thwacks, so apparent on the Linn recording. If you bought the first volume (Audite 97.677, Symphony No. 1 and No. 4, original version, and Overture, Scherzo and Finale) I’m sure you’ll want the second. The third volume, containing the Cello Concerto and final version of the Fourth Symphony, is due for release in October 2014.

I should add that I haven’t yet heard the new, highly-regarded BPO/Simon Rattle set – review – except for the 1-minute segments from Qobuz, but I see that he attributes his appreciation of Schumann to a meeting long ago with Heinz Holliger, whom he describes as a Schumann ‘nut’ – endorsement of a kind for his mentor’s new recording.

Das WDR Sinfonieorchester und Heinz Holliger setzen ihre Reihe der Einspielungen aller Orchesterwerke von Robert Schumann mit den Symphonien Nr. 2 und 3 fort. Wie schon in den beiden anderen Symphonien (Pizzicato-Rezension hier) sind Holligers Interpretationen sehr ausgefeilt. Kräftige Farben, sehr spontan wirkende Akzente und anregende Rubati kennzeichnen die Aufnahmen, die zwar keinerlei neuen Aspekte vermitteln, aber durchaus attraktiv sind. Am spannendsten finde ich das lustig torkelnde Finale der Rheinischen Symphonie, das sicherlich das eigenartigste Stück dieser CD ist.

Zusammen mit dem WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln zaubert der Dirigent Heinz Holliger schillernde Farben aus der Partitur von Robert Schumann hervor - unsere CD der Woche.

Que connaît-on de Grieg, en dehors de son concerto pour piano, des Suites de Peer Gynt et de ses Pièces lyriques pour piano? Si les partitions chambristes du Norvégien demeurent au répertoire des musiciens, l'œuvre pour orchestre a depuis longtemps déserté les salles de concert. Quel dommage car le métier impeccable, le lyrisme sincère et l'inspiration constante font de Grieg un grand maître, de ceux qui ouvrent les portes de la modernité musicale.

Ce troisième volume dévoile un des pans les plus réussis de son catalogue: les transcriptions par Grieg de ses propres œuvres. Notons d'abord le sens de la couleur. L'orchestration de plusieurs de ses Pièces lyriques pour piano, regroupées sous l'Opus 54, prouve une inventivité certaine: l'orchestre irradie, rivalise de trouvailles avec celui des plus grands - Debussy pour le sens aigu de la transparence, Ravel ou Berlioz pour l'éclat et la luxuriance. La radicalité sonore de Klokkeklang (« son de cloches ») en surprendra plus d'un.

Maître de la miniature, de l'ellipse et du fragment, Grieg brille davantage dans la brièveté que dans les grands développements. Les Trois pièces pour Sigurd Jorsalfar révèlent une musique de scène ou la mélodie folklorique devient un argument précieux pour flirter avec la modernité. Le rêve de Borghild, en guise d'intermezzo, est une musique impalpable, en lambeaux, traversée par de grands souffles lyriques. Plus convenues mais charmantes et efficaces, les Variations sur une vieille mélodie norvégienne feraient une bonne alternative aux Suites de Peer Gynt si les programmateurs de concerts sondaient un peu plus le répertoire oublié.

L'Orchestre de la Radio de Cologne, sous la direction inventive et engagée d'Eivind Aadland, poursuit remarquablement l'enregistrement d'une intégrale promise à faire date.

This is listed as Volume 3, but we are not sure what happened to Volume 2. Volume 1 was Peer Gynt and such, and we reviewed it very enthusiastically (Sept/Oct 2011).

I am less enthusiastic about this installment. After all, Beecham recorded the Old Norwegian Romance and In Autumn and it’s hard to beat Beecham at anything or even match him. And Arthur Fiedler did a glorious recording of the Lyric Suite that makes this one sound earnest and plodding.

Well, one may feel that this young conductor takes the music more seriously. It’s heritage to him, after all. But heaviness and ploddingness (is that a word?) are the result. The sound is, as usual with Audite and this orchestra, quite beautiful. But sweetness and flow seem in small supply.