Schumann: Symphonies Nos. 1-4 (complete)

For the young Schumann, the composition of symphonies was a long-held ambition, one that could only be fulfilled through a whirlwind apprenticeship in mastering piano music, song and chamber music. Each genre he worked on with feverish intensity until in 1841, having finally overcome the obstacles placed in his way by his beloved Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck, he married her, and promptly set to work, as if to prove to her, to himself and to the world that he was fit to emulate Beethoven’s example. The ‘Spring’ Symphony he dashed off in a matter of days, and although the subtitle had its roots in a (suppressed) piece of poetic inspiration, there’s no question that this is young man’s music of the highest exuberance, bursting with vitality and with the thematic links that charge Schumann’s works with sometimes dangerous energy. If the later symphonies are more soberly organised, if anything their expressive impact is all the greater, reaching a peak in the Bachinspired central section of the Second’s slow movement and the awesome processional of the Third’s fourth movement, which he wrote, as it were, in the shadow of Cologne Cathedral.

Riccardo Muti has long been a champion of these works which many other great names have shunned for their supposedly faulty orchestration or wearisome intensity. In this, his second recorded cycle, he finds a supple lyricism, aided by what is generally acknowledged as the finest string section in the world.