Schmidt reviews

Semyon Bychkov and the Vienna Philharmonic blitzed Proms regulars with the revelation of the 2015 season – a symphony by a little-known name that went beyond the usual boundaries of the late-Romantic style. Recordings tend to have favoured Austrian composer Franz Schmidt’s extraordinary apocalyptic cantata The Book of the Seven Seals – also a Proms hit in an earlier season – and the Fourth Symphony, but the Second is the one more likely to blow your mind.

What a bold and enterprising move on the part of Simone Young to present Franz Schmidt’s great if somewhat neglected oratorio Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln (The Book with Seven Seals) for her final concert as music director at the Hamburg State Opera in June 2015. First heard in Vienna in 1938 only three months after the Nazis occupied Austria, it’s undoubtedly a work with some potentially uncomfortable historical baggage, particularly given its dramatic trajectory.

Composed in 1933 as a requiem for his only daughter, Emma, who had died in childbirth the year before, Franz Schmidt’s fourth and finest symphony was clearly also conceived as his own memorial. Already ailing from the heart disease that would kill him six years later, he was convinced that he wouldn’t live to complete it.

 Best known today for his apocalyptic oratorio, The Book with Seven Seals, Franz Schmidt’s reputation has long been clouded by the Nazi salute he reportedly gave at its 1938 Viennese premiere, but Hans Keller, no less, called him ‘the most complete musician I have come across’. Naxos’s impressively developing series of his four symphonies will hopefully help a new, wider listenership hear why. 

  Best known today for his apocalyptic oratorio, The Book with Seven Seals, Franz Schmidt’s reputation has long been clouded by the Nazi salute he reportedly gave at its 1938 Viennese premiere, but Hans Keller, no less, called him ‘the most complete musician I have come across’. Naxos’s impressively developing series of his four symphonies will hopefully help a new, wider listenership hear why. 

This is an unusual collection of unfamiliar music, most of it noble and some of it quietly disturbing. The four terse, dark movements of Rautavaara’s Soldier’s Mass are a universe away from the mystical musings of his later symphonic works, and Sallinen’s early Chorali has a granitic quality that he has allowed to soften with the years. Nielsen’s tiny paraphrase on ‘Nearer My God to Thee’, inspired by the sinking of the Titanic, builds to a brief, shocking catastrophe where we glimpse the cataclysm of the Fifth Symphony.