Goldmark's second Symphony is a work of his maturity (he was in his late fifties when he wrote it, in 1887; the opera that made his international reputation, The Queen of Sheba, was a dozen years in the past), but it sounds more like an early piece, especially from a composer who was among Wagner's Viennese admirers. It is almost neoclassical in style, in the sense that Brahms's Serenades are, and there are touches of Brahms (and of Mendelssohn rather more than touches) to both the scoring and the language. Set beside Brahms, Goldmark is short-breathed (his melodies have a way of proceeding in short phrases, leaning on the bar-lines rather) and beside Mendelssohn he appears heavy-footed (the fairies in his pretty Mendelssohnian scherzo are stoutly shod) but it would be a pity to labour these comparisons since he does have a certain character of his own. He demonstrates this immediately in the first movement, where the obvious order of subjects is reversed, the more forthright and energetic of its ideas coming second, after a genially lyrical opening theme which sets the mood of the movement and of the symphony as a whole. It is characteristic of him also that he should insert a busy and slightly stiff fugato into his development section, inverting his opening idea for the purpose: Goldmark's academicism is mingled at times with naivete. The combination can lead to a merely mechanical industriousness, to a belief that even the scrappiest idea can be made interesting by subjecting it to sequential extension and to fiddly counterpoint, but it also gives rise to such things as the trumpet melody in the trio section of the scherzo: it has a touch of the bandstand to it ('Corporal Jones will now give us a solo on the cornet'): it incorporates a bar and a half from God save the Queen, a bar from Lavender's blue and a fond memory or two of Rossini or Bellini: it is earnestly sentimental and quite delightful. Goldmark is at his best, in fact, during lyrical interludes where he can forget for a page or two that he had written the portentous word 'symphony' on his title-page.
Not the composer, you might think therefore, to write a 21-minute symphonic poem on a myth of violent and disturbing ambivalence, but of course he does no such thing: he has a boldly ceremonious theme to represent Achilles, a clutch of pleasing lyrical ideas for Poenthesilea and her warrior maidens (one of them sounds a bit like the Italian tenor in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier), a touch of faintly Wagnerian yearning for the love scene, a great deal of beaverish development for the battle and a quiet funeral march to end with. It is vastly too long (and for much of its length in unrelieved triple time) and presents Kleist's tragedy as an embroidered sampler rather than as a grandiose panorama, but again the lyrical ideas between the pages of conscientiously efficient working-out have real charm.
A pair of modest discoveries, then, and modest is the word for the performances, too: an orchestra of the second rank giving a decent play-through under a careful conductor. The recorded sound is acceptable, but a bit tinny at times and scrawnily congested in the fuller passages.'