Schumann - The Complete Symphonies (Mahler Edition)
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Free Music Notes for Schumann - The Complete Symphonies (Mahler Edition)
Free Music Review: Brilliant!
Hit: 5 Stars
What a great recording - I have other versions of the second symphony but this version is superb!
Highly recommended!
Scott
Free Music Review: Mahler should also have tried to reorchestrate Bach
Hit: 1 Stars
Mahler has set himself up to be a master orchestrator. He showed some respect to Brahms, and did not mess with his stuff, but Schumann, poor defenseless Schumann, whose last two years were spent neglected in an asylum at Endenich bei Bonn, was fair game.
Schumann had studied Bach carefully and learned some orchestration cues from Bach, especially the doubling of instruments in composition, a trait for which he has since been severely criticized. It was Schumann who had found the St Matthew Passion and brought it to Mendelssohn's attention. To my ear, when the Schumann symphonies are played correctly, i.e. by Leipzig or Dresden, in the original scores, they are among the most beautiful symphonies to be heard. Chailly has performed the fourth symphony of Schumann on an all Schumann DVD with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, so that he has demonstrated convincingly that he can make the original Schumann scores beautiful. What Mahler has done has made the Schumann symphonies suitable for elevator music, if they are not played too loudly.
Sigmund Freud and Mahler had a long walk in the park when Mahler's marriage was breaking up. Mahler returned and never wrote another piece of music. My thoughts are that it would be better for Mahler and all of us as well if Mahler had taken that walk before he focused his attention on Schumann.
Free Music Review: I didn't like it
Hit: 2 Stars
I understand Schumann was not a master orchestrator and tended to over-orchestrate his symphonies. But although Mahler cleared up the texture quite a bit, the overall edit and performance sounds like muzak from the sixties and seventies. This music sounds lobotomized: it doesn't sound like Schumann--or even Mahler for that matter--but it sounds much more like 101 Strings or Leroy Anderson. And Chailly wasn't able to keep that tendency from occuring in many places.
This is an unsuccessful, if curious, experiment IMHO. I would rather recommend Kubelik's performance of the original orchestration with the Berlin or Bernstein's with the Vienna (Heh! Now there's a man has been known to edit the orchestrations of a few classics in his day!)
My two cents.
Free Music Review: Mahler made a good up-grade
Hit: 4 Stars
Mahler got it right. Many small changes to the orchestration, here and there, make Schumann's Symphonies all the more enjoyable. He sorted out some weaknesses and lightly re-scored in places for even better results. This is super-polished Schumann, not Mahlerized-versions.
Having performed all of these symphonies with various orchestras over the years, it has been a delight for me to discover the Mahler editions, especially in these fine performances by the Gewandhaus and Chailly - ebbing and flowing beautifully, full of nuance and detail - most entertaining and polished.
You will enjoy these performances a great deal if you enjoy Schumann.
Free Music Review: Chailly, good, but Decca, bad
Hit: 4 Stars
Two questions to Decca: why have not been #1 and #3 issued separately, and why has the Genoveva Overture included with #2 and #4 been removed? Weird. Thanks to Decca, I drop a star. That said, I own #2/#4 and they are very modern performances, clean, fast, dramatic. They are among my favourite versions (with Sawallisch).
As to the Mahler arrangements vs. original scoring: For many years I have been trying to convince myself Schumann scoring was not that bad, after all. But I can't -- orchestration is not only about textures, but also about building melody, rhythm, harmony, and so on, and except in a few cases (#2, mov. III, Adagio, with a very inspired Schumann, indeed), the composer seem unable to use effectively the orchestra for that. IMO, Mahler improved the symphonies (and he didn't touch #2/III at all), even if the way Mahler changed the harmony at the end of #2/IV sounds, well, wrong to my ears.
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