R Schumann: Symphony No. 4
Bucharest Symphony Orchestra/John Axelrod
Orchid Classics ORC100257 55:50 mins
Robert Schumann composed his D minor Symphony in 1841, but following its unsuccessful premiere and his failure to get it published he laid it aside for a full ten years, before deciding to revise it. It’s the 1851 version that’s almost always heard today, and it’s true that Schumann did improve some details: the transition from the slow introduction to the first Allegro, for instance, and the melodic content of the finale’s beginning. But at the same time he thickened the orchestration of the outer movements, and Brahms, for one, made no secret of his preference for the more transparent original 1841 score. Brahms’s eventual insistence on having that version published led to a serious rift between him and Clara Schumann.
This new recording by the Bucharest Symphony Orchestra under conductor John Axelrod may be the first time that both forms of the symphony have been presented on a single album, allowing for instant comparison. More’s the pity, then, that Axelrod doesn’t observe the details of Schumann’s scores more closely. In the 1841 score, for instance, there’s no repeat of the finale’s first half, but Schumann did mark a repeat in his revision. By omitting that later repeat Axelrod sacrifices an important difference between the two versions. The original finale, moreover, culminates in a long accelerando, with the last half-dozen pages played presto (the delaying of the presto until the final moments was another of Schumann’s 1851 improvements), but Axelrod once again fails to follow the composer’s own directions.
Unfortunately the performances themselves also leave something to be desired, with the Romance slow movement in both of the versions being unduly ponderous. Misha Donat
