Schumann Symphony No. 3 'Rhenish' - orchestration by Veniamin (Benjamin) Tolba

[sdtom]

I'm quite satisfied with the Haitink recordings

[Alan Howe]

That's good to hear. From the excerpts I've heard, so would I be.

[ncouton]

Well, when "conductors ... really spend time on balance and voicing", in a way they arrange themselves with the score... and waste their time to obtain what they could more easily get by crossing useless doublings, for example. 

[Alan Howe]

Could you explain further, please?

[Double-A]

There is something special going on with Schumann.  Our harmony teacher played us a passage from Schumann where a dominant seventh was resolved upward.  Horrors!  He did it with a sneer, implying there was something serious wrong with Schumann.  And the story about his "incompetent" instrumentation goes into the same direction:  Nobody can deny the extraordinary (I use this word deliberately and mean it literally) inspiration at the heart of Schumann's music.  Yet there seems to be a reluctance to see him as a fully competent composer in a technical sense.  So the approach to his music often seems to be to try and find something, anything, in the music to wrinkle one's nose at.

I can't explain this, but the phenomenon is there.

[Mark Thomas]

Prejudice in all spheres of life, blind and irrational though it is, has a way of passing down through the generations doesn't it? Those of us here who champion the cause of one unsung composer or another experience it every time we come across a critic or well known musician who has never heard a note of our subject's music, but nonetheless manages to have a negative opinion of its worth.

[chill319]

Prejudice in all spheres of life, blind and irrational though it is, has a way of passing down through the generations doesn't it?

Odd that literature has critical room for so many different voices over the centuries, but for many musicians classical music does not. Or is it odd?... Suppose every time we started reading a new novel it had likely been chosen by our tutor and was being interpreted for us by that tutor. That's more or less the situation for young performers learning the repertoire. Granted something similar can happen in a classroom, but perhaps not as intensively as in periodic, frequent one-on-one encounters. Makes passing on prejudices a bit more efficient, at least.

[Double-A]

I was more thinking about academics than performers.  Professional performing musicians often have surprisingly little knowledge about the repertoire, but the Schumann-is-a-bad-orchestrator type stories come more from critics and academics.  Another example:  The last chapter of Bea Friedlands dissertation on Louise Farrenc, the summary chapter:  Friedland goes out of her way to avoid praising any Farrenc works too much and states that Farrenc was after all only a "Kleinmeister" (do I need to translate this word?).  In other words she needs to be careful if she wants to keep her reputation as a musicologist.

BTW there are also unsung novelists, playwrights and poets (unread, unprinted...?).

[Mark Thomas]

I have a friend who, when he was a young up-and-coming musicologist, was very interested in the unsung German composers of the 19th century. His doctoral dissertation was about the music of two comparatively well-known examples. A few years into his career he was quietly taken to one side and advised that, highly regarded though he was, if he wanted to progress he should drop this enthusiasm and concentrate on more mainstream musicology. Reluctantly he took the advice, and is now a professor.

[Alan Howe]

And yet it doesn't have to be like that. Think, for, example of Robert Pascall and his work on Wilhelm Berger...

[chill319]

In musicology, as elsewhere, challenges can accelerate growth. Not uncommonly the professors in a department best at critical methodologies do not specialize in the aspect of music that most interests the individual graduate student. The late Joe Kerman showed one way to handle this. He specialized in Renaissance music in grad school, then moved into 19th-century repertoire for much of his early and middle career, during which he became one of the founders of the important journal 19th-Century Music. The critical skills he learned while working with madrigals not only were transferable but they brought a fresh perspective to his (earlier, at least) work in 19th-century music. And as thread penance, Kerman was an early advocate of Schumann the symphonist, back when recordings of the symphonies were few and far between.

[MartinH]

Forgive my ignorance, but was there really a time when Schumann symphony recordings were far and few between? It's not like he was in the company of Mahler or Bruckner. Schumann was championed by leading conductors throughout the 20th century and when Mahler symphonies truly were scarce in the record stores, there were Schumann's to be had, at least I thought. Maybe not as popular as the Beethoven 9 or the last three Tchaikovsky, or the Brahms.

[eschiss1]

In the LP days and before, maybe. Doing a bit of searching on Worldcat for earlier LPs of eg op/oeuvre 38 and while quite a few are undated (and will have to have date estimated some other way) there aren't that many turning up in the LP era between 1952 and 198something... (Well, I should modify that. Maybe 80 odd, though some of those, this being WCat are duplicates. I should seek a Schumann LP discography website...)

[eschiss1]

... Well, that's- I stand corrected. (Mitropoulos- or Alexander Brailowsky?- conducted the NY Philharmonic in sym 2 as part of a series of Office of War Information recordings? Kind of neat. I find this from ca 1939 incidentally intriguing too for people also interested in the WPA...)
(And as early(?) as 1956 Paul Kletzki recorded all 4 symphonies with the Israel Philharmonic for Trianon.)

[Mark Thomas]

When I began buying LPs in the very early 70s, I bought a CBS (I think) boxed set of Georg Szell conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in the four Schumann symphonies. IIRC it was trumpeted as being ground-breaking because it was the first complete cycle of the works to be recorded.