Hot on the heels of Raff's Third Symphony Im Walde, which I reviewed last month, come two more of his programme symphonies, part of a cycle evoking the four seasons that was possibly suggested by Spohr's Seasons Symphony (No. 9). As usual, Raff gives his movements descriptive titles—''Spring's Return'', ''The First Spring Bouquet'' and so on; and in each of the works it is the scherzos, with their supernatural associations, that contain the most vivid and memorable music. That of No. 8 (1876) graphically depicts the witches' revels on Walpurgis Night (May 1st), with its shrieking, cackling woodwind and deep, baleful brass—a tour de force, this, for all its echoes of Berlioz's ''Witches' Sabbath'' and Mendelssohn's Erste Walpurgisnacht Cantata. The other movements, despite their conscientious craftsmanship and expert orchestration, wear less well: the first has a beautiful atmospheric in tempo introduction (a Raff speciality), but, like the finale, suffers from rhythmic squareness and a tendency to ramble inconsequentially, while the homely slow movement is pleasantly euphonious but ultimately anodyne.
The Summer Symphony of 1878 is more consistently successful—less prolix and more distinctive in its ideas. Again there is an imaginative introduction, with shimmering string textures suggesting the heat of the day; and the first subject is a delightfully jaunty folk-tune on the clarinet. The duple-time scherzo, entitled ''Elves' Hunt'', is full of flickering, evanescent woodwind figures that recall Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream scherzo, though Raff also introduces a romantic duet for solo cello and viola. If the pastoral slow movement (marked, with a nod to Virgil, ''Ekloge'') tends to meander after the oboe's initial evocation of shepherds' pipes, the finale, a celebration of the harvest, is, for Raff, unusually terse, growing from a noble, hymnlike theme to a rousing apotheosis.
Though the playing lacks the last degree of polish with some slightly scrawny violin tone and occasionally rough, ill-tuned brass (as at the opening of No. 8), the Slovak orchestra under Urs Schneider (Swiss-born, like Raff) gives convincing, full-blooded accounts of both works, with some specially deft woodwind playing in the scherzos. The recording is pleasingly ample and the playing time close to the maximum possible on CD. If these fluent, mildly picturesque symphonies have less individuality than Nos. 3 and 5, they still offer agreeable, unproblematic listening to anyone who cares to explore beyond the nineteenth-century symphonic mainstream.'