Schumann: Symphony No. 4 in D minor, Op. 120

Kenneth Woods and Orchestra of the Swan continue their revelatory cycle pairing the symphonies of Hans Gál and Robert Schumann, with Gál’s Second and Schumann’s Fourth. Kenneth Woods, Principal Guest Conductor of Stratford-upon-Avon based Orchestra of the Swan, has made international headlines for his ongoing cycle of world-premiere recordings of Hans Gál’s Symphonies. The set, paired with the symphonies of Robert Schumann, has been featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Performance Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, in Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine, and dozens of other newspaper and online reviews, introducing a new generation to Gál’s wide-ranging and extensive oeuvre.

Woods and OOTS continue the cycle with Gál’s Second and Schumann’s Fourth. The Gál, written in 1942-43 during the darkest war years, is perhaps the most personal of the composer’s four symphonies. With an emotional depth and haunting beauty, the symphony distils the process of overcoming pain and loss into the language of pure music. Composed a century earlier, Schumann’s Fourth is arguably his most popular symphony.

The extraordinarily gifted Guido Cantelli (1920–1956) was born in Novara, Italy.

After studies at the Milan Conservatory, he returned to Novara in 1941 to become conductor and artistic director of the Teatro Coccia which had been founded by Toscanini. After the war, in which he served in the Italian Army, he started to conduct the La Scala Orchestra in Milan and appeared with other European orchestras. In 1948 Toscanini, who held him in the highest regard, invited him to be a guest conductor with the NBC orchestra in New York. From 1949 each year, Cantelli conducted the NBC, the New York Philharmonic and Boston Symphony orchestras. In 1950, he was at the Edinburgh Festival and in 1951 Lucerne, Salzburg and Venice Festivals. He started recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra for EMI but was tragically killed in an air crash in Paris in 1956. Walter Legge wrote, ‘no other conductor in the history of the art has established, so early in life, so wide a fame’. While studio recordings validate that encomium, none quite captured the incandescence of his live performances.

These important and very rare live recordings featuring the Philharmonia Orchestra derive from the Music Preserved archive and have never been released before. They have been carefully restored by Paul Baily.

The Glasgow Herald stated that Cantelli’s Schumann nearly raised the roof with its excitement but it also noted ‘the plasticity of line and transparent textures’. Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien was a Cantelli speciality and was noted by the Glasgow Herald for ‘its breathtaking moments’ which held the audience in rapt silence. Similarly, Debussy’s La Mer got praise for the conductor’s feeling for orchestral colouring and ‘rhythmic exactitude that mark the conductor at his best … There is no mistaking the greater impetuosity and attack in the Edinburgh account compared to the Kingsway Hall recording made four days later.’ (Mark Kluge)

These performances offer an intimate glimpse of a wonderful partnership between Cantelli and the Philharmonia Orchestra which was so tragically cut short.

Inspired by his wife, Clara, Robert Schumann wrote four symphonies over a decade, with No 1, the ‘Spring’, first perfomed – under Felix Mendelssohn – in 1841. Riccardo Muti’s distinction in this cycle is affirmed by Gramophone’s review of No.3, the ‘Rhenish’: ‘The rhythm is firm and bold, the melodic line clearly drawn, the individual playing given every encouragement, not least with some magnificent horn solos. He is no less masterly and sympathetic with the finale.’

The Violin Concerto by Johannes Brahms is for performers and audience alike one of the loveliest, most challenging examples of the genre. It was with this work that Arabella Steinbacher gave her debut in the Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein in December 2007, the same hall where the composer himself had conducted on occasion. Arabella Steinbacher’s debut was accompanied by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under its chief conductor Fabio Luisi, who are also to be heard on this live recording in Schumann’s Fourth Symphony. Both this symphony and the Brahms concerto were dedicated to the leading violin virtuoso of the second half of the 19th century, namely Joseph Joachim. The work soon began a triumphal procession through the concert halls. Thanks to Joachim’s numerous famed successors, it would be impossible to imagine the violin repertoire today without it.

Arabella Steinbacher won the Joachim Violin Competition in Hanover several years ago, which was a starting point of her current international career. She is furthermore a worthy representative of the violin style that is celebrated in Brahms’s concerto, a style that is virtuosic without virtuosity becoming an end in itself. Thanks to her much-praised brilliant, precise tone, the listener remains aware throughout that the solo part never recedes completely into the background, even where the orchestra unfolds its most expansive symphonic arguments – such as in the presentation of the work’s themes and in the sensitive orchestration of the first and second movements. Arabella Steinbacher fully savours the works’ variety of colour and climax. In the brilliant cadenza of the first movement and in the highly spirited third, she draws on an embarrassment of virtuosic riches which is masterly.

Born in Vienna in April 1902, the cheery-looking Josef Krips seems to have been pre-destined to achieve eminence in the Viennese classics. He recorded with both, the Wiener Philharmoniker and the key London orchestras for Decca in the 1940s, 50s and 60s and the interpretations have genuine expressive power while remaining devoid of exaggeration or affectation.

Here we have Krips giving us the First and Fourth symphonies, respectively of Brahms and Schumann. With the Wiener Philharmoniker he whips up an almost uncontainable sense of thrill in Brahms’s First. ‘I wrote the Symphony in that first flush of spring which carries a man away even in his old age, and comes over him anew every year’ wrote Schumann of his First Symphony. Krips’s way with the work is unforced and natural, and of his two recordings of Schumann’s Fourth (in 1952 and 1957), the second is included here.

This issue forms part of a series of five reissues devoted to the art of Josef Krips.

Recording producers: John Culshaw (Brahms No. 1); Victor Olof (Brahms No. 4); James Walker (Schumann No. 1); Christopher Whelan (Schumann No. 4);

Balance engineers: James Brown (Brahms No. 1); unidentified (Brahms No. 4); Ken Cress (Schumann No. 4); Gordon Parry (Schumann No. 4)

Recording locations: Sofiensaal, Vienna, Austria, October 1956 (Brahms No. 1); Kingsway Hall, London, United Kingdom, April 1950 (Brahms No. 4), October 1956 (Schumann No. 4), May 1957 (Schumann No. 1)