Smetana Festive Symphony

[Alan Howe]

Could you explain, please, as I find it tedious, apart from the scherzo.

[Ilja]

It has always seemed to me that particularly Czech performances of this symphony do their level best to make the quote from the Austrian/(later)German anthem at the end sound as little as possible like the modern German anthem. I particularly remember an old Sejna recording that attempts to drown the melody in pretty much everything else.

[MartinH]

This symphony, the Scherzo, has what is for me one of those "earworms". I remember vividly when I first heard the work: I was at a minor league baseball game of all places, with my Sony portable cd player and the then new Marco Polo cd. The tune, or maybe the rhythm, of that scherzo stuck in my head and I frequently find myself thinking about it these 30+ years later. Odd. Other than that, the work never made much of an impression, I've never sought out newer recordings. It's also one score that is somehow, strangely, missing from IMSLP.

[eschiss1]

Why strangely? Most works first published that recently are not on IMSLP either. A piano reduction of the scherzo was published in 1935 by Urbanek and might be PD outside the US, and that could be uploadable but someone needs to upload it, but I think the rest waited to 1964.
There is a MPH reprint of the full score, I see. (This is not uploadable to IMSLP either, but it exists, anyway...)

[dhibbard]

Yes I agree with MartinH:  "This symphony, the Scherzo, has what is for me one of those "earworms"."     I can hear it in my mind as I am typing this out.