Music: Schumann Restored

Robert Schumann’s irrefutable greatness rests on the expressive richness of his piano music and the beauty of his lyric songs. However, his stature as a symphonist has remained unsettled since his death in 1856. For some he is the link between Schubert’s lyricism and Brahms’ grandeur. But The New Grove Dictionary dismisses his symphonies as “inflated piano music with mainly routine orchestration.” Because of their melodic fecundity and power, they remain widely performed and recorded. Still, conductors from Gustav Mahler to George Szell have edited their working scores, attempting to compensate for Schumann’s putative deficiencies: amateurish orchestration; opaque, overdense textures; a shaky grasp of symphonic form.

Now conductor John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique have recorded Schumann’s orchestral music (Archiv Produktion; 3 CDs) using period instruments and adhering to period performance practices. The effect is analogous to the restored ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Stripped of the meddling of others (added parts, re-written transitions, etc.) and the blurred tonal qualities that large modern ensembles can create, these fervent performances reveal sculptural definition, brightness, clarity and beauty of a previously undisclosed intensity.

Gardiner and his top-notch musicians perform two versions of Symphony No. 4, one from 1841 and the more familiar 1851 score. Both are wonderful in these performances, even if the 1851 version has sacrificed a little boldness for greater texture. The set also includes a dazzlingly virtuosic performance of Schumann’s Konzertstuck for Four Horns and Orchestra (1849) and two “almost” symphonies: the promising, never completed “Zwickau” Symphony, composed in his youth, and the Overture, Scherzo and Finale (1841), with its passages of surprising delicacy and elfin fantasy.

There are previous period recordings of Schumann’s symphonies (notably a superb 1994 set by Roy Goodman and the Hanover Band on RCA), but these performances are the most brilliant, penetrating and communicative. They may even force Grove, in the new edition now being prepared, to reverse its judgment.

–By Elliot Ravetz