Schumann Symphony No. 3 'Rhenish' - orchestration by Veniamin (Benjamin) Tolba

[Alan Howe]

I remember it well!

[adriano]

Oh yes, then followed the Kubelik DGG cycle, then the Bernstein then that boring Philips set conducted by Eliahu Inbal and the Solti DECCA. All my respect goes to the later Karajan set! Am I right with this chronology?

[Alan Howe]

Sounds about right. It was Karajan that really did it for me - but his cycle is often considered overblown in these days of pygmy-HIP recordings, more's the pity. His was a huge ego, but also a huge talent.

[eschiss1]

Was the Szell recorded before 1956? I might be wrong about the Klecki I admit but...

[adriano]

They were done 1958-60. Not to forget the Piano Concerto with the great Leon Fleisher - and the Manfred Overture as couplings. They were also praised for the sonics. That was my first encounter with Schumann's music.

[Mark Thomas]

Yes, mine too.

LP details here.

[Alan Howe]

Kletzki's cycle apparently dates from 1956:
https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Kletzki-Schumann-Symphonies-Philharmonic/dp/B002U59ZFY
BTW Konwitschny recorded them in 1960/1:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Schumann-Four-Symphonies-Overtures-Konzertst%C3%BCck/dp/B0000035O0/ref=sr_1_79?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1472768724&sr=1-79&keywords=schumann+symphonies

[chill319]

Re Franz Konwitschny (a favorite Bruckner conductor): The notes to his early 1960s recordings of the Schumann symphonies emphasize how new the music was to him at the time he recorded it. Something of a sea change seems to have occurred around the centenary of Schumann's death. Of course, the Furtwangler Symphony 4 and the Toscanini Symphony 3 predate that centenary, but in my part of the world at that time, both recordings were hard to obtain and live performances of the works impossible to find, unlike live performances of Carnival.

[Alan Howe]

The notes to his early 1960s recordings of the Schumann symphonies emphasize how new the music was to him at the time he recorded it.

Now that is interesting. Thanks for that snippet.

[MartinH]

In regards to Schumann not being all that well-known in earlier generations....

I have a large collection of old music books. One of them, The Victor Book of the Symphony by Charles O'Connell was published in 1941. At the end is a list of recommended recordings. Victor, of course. Schumann 1: Koussevitsky/Boston. Schumann 2: Ormandy/Philadelphia. Schumann 4: Ormandy/Minneapolis. NO Third Symphony! Of course complete cycles by Beethoven and Brahms are there, as well as significant amounts of Mozart, Sibelius(!), and Tchaikovsky. Even Gliere's 3rd. But no Schumann 3rd.

In the preface to the third edition of his book on conducting Beethoven in 1928, Felix Weingartner wrote "The necessity is also confirmed by the growing interest in Schumann's symphonies..." He was talking about his justification for making changes in orchestration in music to clarify and improve the sound.

So maybe Schumann is a Johnny-come-lately after all.

[Gareth Vaughan]

In my teens, which was the late 1960s, I vividly recall attending a concert in Barry at which a professional orchestra (might have been the the RPO - can't remember now) played Schumann's 4th and Brahms' 4th. Would it happen today, I wonder. Quite some concert. It was well attended too. I think there was also a piece by Daniel Jones.

[adriano]

Still remaining a big fan of Szell, Bernstein and Karajan, I thought this interesting article of 1998 by Richard Taruskin, reacting to the release of Gardiner's Schumann's Archiv/DGG cycle may be useful.

I don't completely agree with the reviewer (I like Gardiner's interpretations very much, inclduding his own introductory booklet notes), but the "Schumann question" is very well described in this article:
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DON'T look now, but Robert Schumann is being rescued again. This time the deliverers are John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, his period-instrument ensemble, performing the four numbered ''canonical'' symphonies, plus the early unfinished one in G minor (in somebody's eclectic conflation of its two extant sources); the original 1841 version of the Fourth; the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, and the ''Konzertstuck'' in F for four horns and orchestra, all in a three-CD Archiv set (457 591-2).

It happens about as regularly as El Nino. Some conductor suddenly realizes that Schumann was not the hopeless bumbler we thought he was, but was rather a good composer, actually. All we have to do is trust him. In the 60's it was Leonard Bernstein. ''Mr. Bernstein has faith in the rightness of Schumann's own instrumentation,'' the jackets of the New York Philharmonic's recordings proclaimed. They gave listeners a chance -- nay, ''the unique opportunity'' -- to hear the music ''just as Schumann left it, unburdened with the usual revisions designed to 'correct' the composer's reputed deficiencies as an orchestrator.''

In the 50's it was George Szell, who promoted his Cleveland Orchestra set with an essay in these very pages announcing that ''Schumann's symphonies can be a thrilling experience to both performers and audiences if Schumann's case is stated clearly and convincingly through the proper style of interpretation.'' Szell acknowledged Schumann's ''inability to establish proper balances,'' admonishing further that ''this can and must be helped with all means known to any professional conductor who professes to be a cultured and style-conscious musician.'' Retouching, however, must be applied with ''much soul-searching and discrimination.''

Gustav Mahler (who had not yet been canonized but was about to be) took some ritual lumps. He had made ''a most unfortunate mistake'' by resorting to ''wholesale reorchestration'' of the symphonies, in perpetrating which he ''adulterates the character of these works by wrapping them in a meretricious garb of sound completely alien to their nature and, in some instances, even goes so far as to change the music itself.''

Szell's own amendments covered ''the whole range from subtle adjustment of dynamic marks to the radical surgery of reorchestrating whole stretches'' (as distinct, somehow, from ''wholesale reorchestration''), but this was not mentioned on the record jackets. Instead, in a move that anticipated by decades the claims of Early Music maestros today, the emphasis was placed on hardware. ''Listeners may note the unusually mellow trumpet sound,'' the sleeve note suggested. ''Known as 'Austrian trumpets,' the instruments used here are of wide bore and have rotary valves.''

Now come Mr. Gardiner and his band, elevating the rhetoric still higher. ''The general view is that Schumann was a gifted amateur who could not orchestrate,'' the conductor has been telling interviewers.

In the booklet, he writes about removing ''the false patina of late-Romantic orchestral sonorities which is totally alien to Schumann's esthetic and ideals,'' maintaining that any problem conductors have had with Schumann within living memory ''simply evaporates in an accomplished period performance.'' By reducing the orchestra to the size ''for which Schumann had assiduously fashioned his symphonies,'' by restoring the right ''bowing styles, phrasing and articulation, as well as the spatial deployment of the musicians (with violins and violas standing for symphonies, as was the custom then in Leipzig),'' one dispels the ''web of myth'' and reveals Schumann as he really was, ''an intuitively able and imaginative composer for the orchestra of his day.''

Stuff and nonsense, every word. By now it is easy to see what performers are really seeking when they noisily side with the composer against critics real or imagined (including ''practical critics,'' like Mahler) and presume to speak on his behalf. They are seeking authority (code name: ''authenticity'') and privilege. ''Criticize me, and you're no friend of Schumann'' is the threatening implication. L'auteur, c'est moi.

This is an old ventriloquists' ploy, and now, of course, it is especially rife among early-musickers. ''What do you think Bach would say if he were here?'' the harpsichordist Davitt Moroney asked a student at a master class in Berkeley, Calif., not long ago, immediately casting himself as Edgar Bergen to old Sebastian's Charlie McCarthy. Hand on heart, I swear and depose that the first thing Mr. Moroney's Bach puppet wanted to know was, ''What edition are you using?''

It's not always that risible, but the position is always false, and in the case of Schumann its mendacity goes right to the first assumption, that the composer needs defenders. Well over a century ago, in the first edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the great German scholar Philipp Spitta wrote that ''Schumann's symphonies may without injustice be considered as the most important which have been written since Beethoven.'' Surely few today would disagree that they were the most important Classical-style symphonies to appear between Beethoven's and Brahms's.

Nor were Mahler's interventions the arbitrary vandalism that Szell, and now Mr. Gardiner in his booklet, have alleged. They did not amount to a whole new score, just retouchings and (in particular) textural thinnings that Mahler marked in his performance scores and had copied into the players' parts. They were never published, but the scores and parts have been available on rental from Universal Edition since Mahler's time, and have even been recorded (by Aldo Ceccato and the Bergen Philharmonic on two Bis CD's). Their lightening effect is actually quite similar to what Mr. Gardiner achieves with his period band.

So the ''general view'' Mr. Gardiner cites is his own little web of myth. If Schumann's reputation as a symphonist ever suffered an eclipse, it was during the period from the 1850's to the 1870's, when, under pressure from Liszt, Wagner and the so-called ''New Germans,'' the symphony itself briefly suffered one. It was Brahms who rescued Schumann, not Bernstein or Szell, let alone the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique.

BUT revolutionary? Romantic? Prim and perky would be more like it. The tradition that feeds Mr. Gardiner's approach to Schumann is that of 20th-century modernism and nothing earlier. If these were really ''period'' performances, they would be awash in tempo rubato, string portamento and other practices of which Mr. Gardiner, as a 20th-century musician, heartily disapproves. Not that his tempos are completely inflexible. He even lets his strings slide ever so gingerly through large slurred intervals (as in the introduction to the Overture, Scherzo and Finale). But these are grudging, chary concessions to ''performance practice,'' not the joyful recovery of forgotten lore that they might have been. And that is because the ''false patina'' Mr. Gardiner deplores was the historical reality. His attempt to scrub it away could not be more anachronistic.

This really should not bother anyone. Remaking the classics is the only way to keep them alive. The trouble is that the bright, fresh, delightfully clean and clear-textured if somewhat top-heavy sonority Mr. Gardiner elicits from his band is rarely matched by any comparable novelty in interpretation. Tempos, to begin with what is objectively testable, are almost always what we're used to, not what Schumann prescribed with his metronome. Again, there is nothing wrong with that. At least one of Schumann's metronome settings, for the finale of the Second Symphony, is generally conceded to be unplayable, and it is not attempted here. But falling back on the modern consensus hardly validates a claim to the composer's authority.

In the First Symphony, Mr. Gardiner's tempos are fully in accord with those listed two decades ago by Brian Schlotel, an English scholar, in a useful survey of midcentury recordings, including Szell's. As in most of the others, Mr. Gardiner's first movement is faster than Schumann's, his second movement slower, and the finale much faster. The speeds of the scherzo and the first trio in the third movement, unlike those Schumann notated but like most of the ones Mr. Schlotel calibrated, are in a simple proportional relationship: two beats of scherzo equal three of trio.

The Boston conductor David Epstein, in his recent book ''Shaping Time,'' claims that the pleasure we take in proportional tempos is ''natural'' and that music in repertory inevitably slips into such relationships over time, making them ''traditional.'' That sort of tradition, Mr. Epstein suggests, is what keeps repertories alive. But the period-performance movement is founded, at least in theory, on resistance to socially mediated tradition, what Mr. Gardiner so sneeringly calls the ''patina.'' (So is modernist music-making, of course, beginning with Mahler's famous battle cry equating tradition with sloppiness.) Should he not practice what he preaches, or else stop preaching?

His performances differ noticeably from traditional ones only in the niceties of timbre and balance. And nice niceties they are. But are they enough? In the ''Konzertstuck'' for four horns, they certainly are. The soloist's opening riff is hair-raising, almost worth the price of the album. Ditto the early version of the Fourth Symphony. The lightness of the orchestration contrasts all the more tellingly, in Mr. Gardiner's hands, with the dark, thickly laden version that we know, making the latter's sterner, even somewhat dingy coloration (the result of massive doubling of lines) seem less a miscalculation and more a deliberately struck, Beethovenian ''D minor'' attitude.

Mr. Gardiner's chief reason for preferring the earlier version is different, though, and symptomatic: the original audience found it baffling. To a modernist that reaction is a plus. To Schumann it was a reason to revise. The revision was successful in that it was well received. To Mr. Gardiner, however, Schumann's success smacked of compromise, ''as though he was willfully expunging some of the more audacious features of the original, replacing them with something safer but, in the process, more commonplace.'' Yet anyone listening to the original version who knows the standard one will miss the thematic recalls in the finale, which occurred to Schumann only as he was revising. They are something added, not expunged, and they are the opposite of commonplace.

In the canonical symphonies, as opposed to the novelty items, there is as much loss as gain in Mr. Gardiner's performances; and what is lost, unfortunately, has a lot to do with why the symphonies are loved (that is, why they have become canonical and familiar). Arguing against foolproofing the scores, Mr. Schlotel put it this way: ''The sense of striving for high ideals, which the symphonies communicate, is in a way echoed by the orchestra striving for effect in those passages that are difficult to bring off.''
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In other words, there is an ethical dimension, endemic to the Romantic concept of art, that is lost from the sleek sound-surface that modern performers -- and period performers, paradoxically, most of all -- have fetishized. The really crucial and compelling aspects of Romantic music are precisely what is undreamt of in their philosophy.

THE upshot, simply, is that Mr. Gardiner's ''esthetic and ideals'' are very different from Schumann's. And why not? He's entitled. And we are equally entitled to prefer his brisk Lipton-tea approach to the music if, like him, we are leery of anything stronger. His performances are full of charming details (my favorite: the articulation of the woodwind accents in the second theme from the opening movement of the First Symphony). And like many scrupulous period bands, the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique is much more alert to dynamics than are most standard orchestras today, which is also a pleasure.

But to the odious claim of privilege he has alleged, Mr. Gardiner and his band are manifestly not entitled. Its dishonesty diminishes them. It taints their excellent musicianship with charlatanry. They really ought to give it up.

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So what are you thinking about all this?

[Alan Howe]

Actually I rather like Gardiner's Schumann set - it has terrific Schwung. It's his more recent efforts I deplore, e.g. his dessicated, sonically compromised Mendelssohn symphonies recorded at that most ungrateful of venues - London's Barbican. Unless you can audition first, I'd avoid anything recorded there.

However, if I had to choose I'd still prefer Gardiner to arch-iconoclast Norrington. And if I could take one set, it'd probably be Karajan's - which I grew up with.

[matesic]

I gather Taruskin has long been an arch critic of the HIP movement, but here it seems he isn't complaining about the performances themselves but merely Gardiner's presumption in suggesting he has unique insights to offer. Although back in the 80's I was a big fan of groups like the English Concert, for some while now I've begun to suspect that the HIP movement's achievements are all in the past. I wonder what Taruskin would have made of the penultimate night of this year's BBC Proms, consisting of a rather dull performance of Verdi's Requiem given by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment... How about Beethoven quartets on a consort of viols?

[eschiss1]

Well, no, but a concert comparing and contrasting the Beethoven Csharp with other (rather earlier, more Baroque than Romantic- Purcell and before, in England, others ...) examples of the string motet/fantasia could be very thought-provoking...