Schumann: The 4 Symphonies

Read About This Recording

When he was 35 years old and just ending an RCA recording contract that had revolved around American music, Leonard Bernstein decided he was ready to go up against the dominant Old-Master European conductors in the hallowed European repertoire. One of the first things he recorded for a company called Brunswick was a symphony by Robert Schumann. About 10 years later, Bernstein had taken command of the New York Philharmonic and signed on with Columbia Records to tape almost every score ever written. Before long he had recorded all four Schumann symphonies, a dynamic set that quickly became a favorite among music lovers.

By the mid-1980s Bernstein had himself achieved the status of Old Master. He was conducting mainly the venerable European orchestras and started re-recording the standard Austro-German repertoire for Deutsche Grammophon. Naturally, he took up the Schumann symphonies one more time, now with the magnificent Vienna Philharmonic. The result was controversial, but, for open-eared collectors, it stands as one of the most compelling Schumann cycles ever recorded.

Now, the Society is pleased to offer Bernstein's remarkable last Schumann recordings in a specially-priced two-CD set.

Schumann's Problem Children

Schumann has taken a lot of criticism over the past century and a half for his symphonies. Oh, they're lively and melodic and deeply felt and sincere and entertaining, but they're not orchestrated with much finesse. Schumann had fairly poor orchestras at his disposal, so, to be sure the important melodies could always be heard properly, he assigned them to whole clutches of instruments at once. The result is rather thick and lumpy, and almost everyone who conducts these works now streamlines the orchestration a bit. You sometimes get the feeling that conductors feel they must make a special case for the symphonies, and nobody made a more ardent, personal argument for their worth than Leonard Bernstein.

In truth, his way with these works is not to everyone's taste. Bernstein's performances evoke the time, before World War II, when conductors shaped performances with great freedom, stretching out or increasing the tempo to emphasize certain structural or rhetorical points, bringing out interesting secondary voices that often lie hidden, punctuating phrases with the skill and flamboyance of great actors performing Shakespeare.

No Apology Necessary

Bernstein's Schumann set does strike cautious listeners as over the top. His performances of the first and fourth symphonies, works that almost always clock in at under half an hour, hover around 33 minutes each, mainly because he takes the slow passages very broadly. But these certainly aren't sleepy performances; they pack a wallop, and they move in directions that may be unexpected but always make sense.

A traditionalist critic for Gramophone magazine who found it difficult to warm up to Bernstein's style still had to admit, writing of the second symphony, that “Leonard Bernstein's account has all the electricity and immediacy one expects of live music-making, and as always there is ample evidence of the special rapport he has established with the Vienna Philharmonic.”

When even a detractor makes that kind of endorsement, you know this is a very special recording.

—James Reel

Quotes

"Leonard Bernstein's account has all the electricity and immediacy one expects of live music-making, and as always there is ample evidence of the special rapport he has established with the Vienna Philharmonic." —Gramophone

Contents

Includes Symphonies: No. 1, Op. 38 Spring; No. 2, Op. 61; No. 3, Op. 97 Rhenish; No. 4, Op. 120.

Vienna Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, Conductor.