Editor’s Choice, Orchestral – July 2016

Back in 2013 oboist-composer-conductor Heinz Holliger, in partnership with the excellent WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln and featuring an august cast of instrumental soloists – violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and pianist Dénes Várjon included – initiated a project to record Robert Schumann’s complete orchestral music. The sixth and final volume contrasts Schumann’s first tentative stab at a symphony – the two-movement torso Zwickauer Symphony – with tautly conceived late-period overtures from the ever popular Manfred to the rarer Julius Caesar and Bride of Messina.

No man or woman alive knows more about the inner-workings of Schumann’s music than Holliger, but his cycle hasn’t always been consistent in the listening. It was Holliger’s bad luck that his first three volumes were released just as Simon Rattle, Robin Ticciati and Yannick Nézet-Séguin released their own symphony cycles and DG sneaked out Abbado’s second. Compared to the lavishly nuanced detail of Rattle and Ticciati’s poetic intensity, Holliger generates a plainer surface – the Second Symphony’s Scherzo lacks Rattle’s skittish momentum and his reading of the Rhenish is no match for Ticciati’s unhinged volatility.

But the weight of Holliger’s scholarly learning can’t be dismissed. Holliger thinks that one key towards informed Schumann interpretation is extrapolating what we know about the rhythmic stresses and inclines of his settings of text to his instrumental music (he told me so in an interview). And right from the get-go of the Spring Symphony Holliger defines a cleanly articulated soundworld that reveals Nézet-Séguin’s generic Romanticism as wanting.

Elsewhere, Kopatchinskaja delivers a guttural, spirited Violin Concerto, while the four French horn players deployed for the Konzertstück make a citrusy and gleeful
sound. In the sixth volume, Holliger manages to weave magic even in a piece like the Overture to Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea (which suffers its longueurs), but vivid characterisation of contrasting moods, and a cameo appearance from The Marseillaise, papers over Schumann’s structural cracks.

John Eliot Gardiner’s take on the Zwickauer Symphony might be more streamlined, but Holliger teases out those melodic and harmonic fingerprints about to blossom in his mature symphonies. His Manfred Overture reminds us of the daring instability of Schumann’s harmony – a music that opens the door, and takes a peek, at some harmonic traits of 20th-century music. The final volume has a slight feeling of mopping up what was left; but Holliger’s interpretive perspectives make it worthwhile.