Hans Rott - Symphony; Suite for Orchestra (Paavo Järvi)
Information
Composer: Hans Rott
Symphony in E major: 1. Alla breve
Symphony in E major: 2. Sehr langsam
Symphony in E major: 3. Scherzo. Frisch und lebhaft
Symphony in E major: 4. Sehr langsam - Belebt
Suite for Orchestra in B major: 1. Scherzo. Allegro con brio
Suite for Orchestra in B major: 2. Letzter Satz. Sehr
schnell
Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra
Paavo Järvi, conductor
Date: 2012
Label: RCA
Review
The Symphony by the unfortunate and short-lived Hans Rott
(1858-1884) didn’t get its first performance until more than a century after
its completion in 1880; but unlike so many similar rediscoveries, it is more
than a curiosity and has not sunk again into oblivion. No, it’s not a concert
favorite, and is unlikely to be. But it has done surprisingly well on CD: This
is at least the sixth recording since Gerhard Samuel’s pioneering account with
the Cincinnati Philharmonia, the crackerjack student orchestra from the
University of Cincinnati that premiered the work.
Granted, Rott’s magnum opus has come in for more than its
share of criticism. While its foreshadowings of Mahler are widely recognized
(including by Mahler himself, who famously dubbed Rott “the founder of the New
Symphony”), a few naysayers have insisted that we find similarities simply
because, as Tony Haywood put it in a review of the Dennis Russell Davies
recording on MusicWeb-International , Rott was “a talented composer coming from
the same ‘stable’ as Mahler, and sharing the same tradition and lofty ideals as
to how symphonic form should progress.” (David Johnson, who likes the symphony
quite a bit, and whose excellent review of the first recording in Fanfare 13:4
gives an informative account of the piece and its history, makes a similar
claim. The Mahlerian moments, he says, “are best explained precisely as Mahler
explained them: both men were nourished by the same Zeitgeist .”) Some have
been put off by the work’s apparent awkwardness—Rott never did get a chance to
hear it, much less revise it, and in places it shows. David Hurwitz, writing in
Classics Today , sniped “whether or not Rott did some of these things first
hardly matters because everyone else did them better.”
So what does it sound like? Does it really sound like
Mahler? Depends on what you mean by “like Mahler.” Certainly, the thematic
premonitions of Mahler’s scores are hard to ignore—not only the first two
symphonies but the Fifth as well, especially in the third movement. On the
other hand, in terms of color and surface spirit, it’s not especially
Mahlerian, except in the Scherzo, which, had it been written after the Mahler
First, would surely be accused of plagiarism. And yet, on a deeper and more
abstract level, the work looks ahead to the Mahler of the Seventh—not so much
in its colors or its specific gestures and harmonies, but in terms of its
formal, harmonic, and rhythmic dislocations, dislocations that are doubly
effective because, on the thematic level, the work is so carefully unified.
Yes, the symphony looks back as well as forward: As we might
expect of a young Bruckner pupil writing at the time, there are lots of
reminiscences of Bruckner, Wagner, and the early German Romantics.
Many—allegedly including even Brahms himself—perceive a lot of Brahms in the
finale, too. It doesn’t sound that way to me: Despite the thematic nod to the
finale of the Brahms First—actually, less glaring than Mahler’s borrowing at
the opening of his Third—the voice is pretty far from Brahmsian. But in any
case, the moments of late-Romantic lingua franca are overwhelmed by Rott’s
willingness to go against the grain, to shift direction, to throw in the
unexpected gesture, to engage extreme dynamic surprise—and his willingness to
push his ideas to the limit. There are a few moments in the first movement that
briefly look ahead to the Ives Second—leading us to wonder in what directions
his talent might have led him. Not a symphony for those who like their music
well mannered, perhaps: But for all its immaturity, it’s a heady work of real
genius.
Until now, the Samuel and Leif Segerstam recordings have
been widely considered the frontrunners in this symphony. Of the two, I’ve
always preferred the Samuel—to my ears, Segerstam’s weighty and Brucknerian
version buries Rott’s quirky spirit and exaggerates his redundancies. But Paavo
Järvi’s performance tops them both, catching the music’s quicksilver with
unmatched dexterity. His tempos are fast, yet in his hands, Rott never sounds
rushed. Exuberant, yes, and youthful, and extroverted, and (considering the
misery of his life) bizarrely self-confident; but never rushed. To add to the
pleasures of the disc, the orchestra plays not only with panache, but with
sensitivity as well (try the treatment of the distant chorale at the end of the
second movement).
RCA’s release is made all the more welcome by the inclusion,
in a performance edition by Johannes Volker Schmidt, of the two more-or-less
extant movements from a planned four-movement Suite, composed even before the
symphony. The richly contrapuntal conclusion (apparently marked simply “Last
Movement” in the score) is especially effective: Heard out of context, you
might momentarily think of Reger, except that Rott has a kind of zip that Reger
rarely attained. A welcome addition to the catalog.
-- Peter J. Rabinowitz, FANFARE
Hans Rott (1 August 1858 – 25 June 1884) was an Austrian
composer and organist. He studied organ with Bruckner and Bruckner said that
Rott played Bach very well, and even improvised wonderfully. Rott completed on
one of his symphony before he sank into depression and died of tuberculosis in
1884, aged only 25. Mahler wrote of Rott as the "Founder of the New
Symphony".
Paavo Järvi (born 30 December 1962 in Tallinn, Estonia) is
an Estonian-born American conductor. He is the eldest son of conductor Neeme
Järvi. Paavo Järvi served as principal conductor of the Frankfurt Radio
Symphony Orchestra from 2006 to 2014. He is currently the music director of the
Orchestre de Paris. Järvi has recorded for several labels and won a Grammy.
Article from http://classicalmjourney.blogspot.com/2015/07/hans-rott-symphony-suite-for-orchestra.html
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