Having accounted for the First Viennese School, my second series about Simon Rattle’s recording history with the Berlin Philharmonic will examine the nineteenth century. This amounts to a blend of depth and breadth that is likely to influence serious listeners in different ways. The only composer that merits three CDs is Johannes Brahms with an account of all four of his symphonies. This makes Brahms the “leader of the pack,” reinforced with a CD of his Opus 45, entitled A German Requiem. Rattle delivers satisfying accounts of all five of these compositions; and I enjoyed listening to bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, my first encounter in several years. Nevertheless, all of this music is so familiar to me that I never encountered an approach to interpretation that would make me sit up and take notice.
Sadly, I reacted about the same way to the two selections that were intended for staged performances but were recorded in concert. The earlier of these is the 2009 recording of the complete score for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 71, his music for the two-act ballet The Nutcracker. The other was a complete studio recording of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, recorded in 2012. Perhaps I have just been saturated by too many encounters with both of these works in performance!
On a much more positive account, I welcomed the presence of the two CDs that account for the tone poems of Antonín Dvořák. My encounters with these pieces have been so few that I am not even sure I have heard all four of them in the past. However, because there are so few of them, I fear that, for many listeners, they may be dwarfed by all of the other selections in this collection. Nevertheless, these are likely to be the selections to which I shall be returning in the future!
The only other composer that is allocated more than one CD is Anton Bruckner. The collection includes the first recording to be made of a “completed” account of that composer’s final (ninth) symphony. The score for the fourth movement was “made whole” through the prodigious efforts of Nicola Samale, Giuseppe Mazzuca, Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, and John Phillips. I wrote about the recording when it was first released, but that was back during my tenure with Examiner.com. So encountering it in this collection amounted to a “return visit.” The only other Bruckner CD is the fourth symphony. While Rattle had recorded a performance of this symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra based on subsequent scholarly efforts by Cohrs, his Berlin recording goes back to the 1886 version edited by Leopold Nowak.
Another performance that is seldom encountered is that of Franz Liszt’s “Faust Symphony.” This amounts to an imaginative extension of the tone poem. In his title Liszt explicitly described the composition as consisting of three character sketches, one for each movement. In “order of appearance” those characters are Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles. While I appreciate having this recording in my collection, I fear that Liszt’s project looked better on paper than as a listening experience.
Where narrative is concerned, Hector Berlioz’ Opus 14 “Symphonie fantastique” and Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” (even with Maurice Ravel’s orchestration) are more convincing. Each of these pieces has a “partner” on its respective CD. The Berlioz album concludes with “La mort de Cléopâtre;” and “Pictures” is coupled with the second symphony (in B minor) by Alexander Borodin, followed by the “Polovtsian Dances” from his Prince Igor opera.
If my reaction to this side of Rattle’s repertoire tends to be somewhat lukewarm, I have not yet given up on him. The lion’s share of his attention is situated solidly in the twentieth century. In my plan it will take six articles to cover that content. Watch this space for further developments!
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