TWO BIG SYMPHONIES

posted by James Reel

Here are reviews I wrote for Fanfare a few months ago of recordings of two oversized symphonies. The more famous of the two fares poorly in the hands of its conductor, but the obscurity is a real winner in every way.

SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 11, “Year 1905” * Roman Kofman, cond; Beethoven O, Bonn * MDG 937 1209-6 (multichannel hybrid SACD: 64:28)

Roman Kofman’s distincly unimpressive Shostakovich cycle continues apace with a thoroughly uninvolving Symphony No. 11, a work that depicts and mourns the failure of the Russian uprising of 1905. Kofman’s reading of the first movement is exceptionally slow, muted, and distant, eventually fading into the background as the listener’s mind wanders. The second movement has turbulence—it’s built into the score—but little bite, and the climax is banal. The third movement, a funereal Adagio, is better, and the final movement shows more spirit, but it’s not enough to make this version competitive. The DSD surround recording places the orchestra in a large space that shows off the brass but swallows the woodwinds. One of my longtime favorite recordings of this is Stokowski’s, and you can’t go wrong with Kondrashin or Mravinsky. In modern surround sound, Pletnev, Rostropovich, Lazarev, and Kitaenko are all far better than this. James Reel

HAUSEGGER Nature Symphony * Ari Rasilainen, cond; WDR SO and Cho * CPO 777 237-2 (multichannel hybrid SACD: 56:37)

This is a wonderful, colorful discovery, although it doesn’t have a sufficiently strong melodic profile to earn a position even in the second rank of late Romantic favorites. Siegmund von Hausegger (1872–1948) was an Austrian conductor noted for his performances of Beethoven and the New German School; in the 1930s he gave back-to-basics performances of Bruckner’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies (Preiser issued his 1938 recording of the Bruckner Ninth on CD some time ago). Hausegger’s most illustrious student was Eugen Jochum, whose interests definitely reflected those of his mentor. Hausegger was also a sometime composer; in his youth, he wrote two operas, one of which was championed by Richard Strauss. But only five big works occupy his mature orchestral catalog, of which the Nature Symphony, from 1911, is the penultimate.

It’s a 56-minute orchestral extravaganza, calling for a large ensemble, with a choral finale setting a pantheistic text by Eckhardt van den Hoogen (the effect calls to mind Liszt’s Faust Symphony rather than Beethoven’s Ninth). It’s splendidly orchestrated, with the orchestra weighted toward the bottom; overall, the music celebrates the sublimity of Austria’s mountains, glaciers and forests, but doesn’t spend much time on twittering birdsong. It’s more a meditative and even primal work, the sort of thing done to such tremendous effect in Mahler’s Symphony No. 3.

There are hints of Mahler here and there: the brass calls in the introduction, the second-movement funeral march, the tumult of the third movement. There are also occasional references to Strauss; the organ pedal-point early on can’t help but remind us of Zarathustra. But more often than not, the composer who came to mind was the darkly Romantic D’Indy (but not his atypical Symphony on a French Mountain Air). Perhaps a more apt parallel would be with Hausegger’s English contemporary Arnold Bax; like Bax, alas, Hausegger was not a distinctive melodist, and this limits the appeal of what is otherwise a highly attractive score.

No small measure of this CD’s success is owed to conductor Ari Rasilainen and his West German Radio Orchestra and Chorus. This is a tight, exciting performance, given all the care and confidence they’d no doubt apply to a similar standard-rep work by Mahler or Strauss. The surround sonics are also impressive: none of the detail ever gets smothered in the voluptuous scoring, and the orchestra has just enough elbow room; it’s not drenched in reverberation.

Don’t let me overstate the case. Hausegger is not some previously undiscovered Mahler. But this release should bring great joy to listeners sympathetic to the late-Romantic Austro-German style. James Reel