“Schumann revealed” says the outer cover to this set. That is a fair enough description, when John Eliot Gardiner here displays in high romantic symphonies the same combination of acute scholarship and imaginative insight that has marked so many of his revelatory baroque recordings. The first point to note is how much more comprehensive this is than previous cycles, even the outstanding RCA set of period performances from Roy Goodman and the Hanover Band, listed above. That offers the Overture, Scherzo and Finale in addition to the four numbered symphonies, but No. 4 comes (without being identified on the cover) in the rare first version of 1841.
Gardiner offers both versions, 1841 and 1851, and his performances of them are very well geared to bringing out the contrasts. Still more fascinating is the inclusion of both the early, incomplete Symphony in G minor (named after Schumann’s home town of Zwickau), and the Konzertstuck of 1849 for four horns, with the ORR soloists breathtaking in their virtuosity in the outer movements, using horns with rotary valves crooked in F. Otherwise, except in three specified movements, natural horns are used, braying clearly through orchestration which always used to be condemned as too thick.
As Gardiner says in his note, “Our aim has been to help untangle and to explode some of the popular myths, such as the one that Schumann was a gifted amateur who could neither orchestrate nor translate the poetry of his solo piano music and Lieder into full orchestral forms”. Later he points out how Schumann was “quick to learn from his own mistakes”, making an exception only over the 1851 revision of the D minor Symphony. Gardiner, like Goodman before him, fairly points out the merits of the 1841 version in transparency and other qualities, suggesting, as others have, that the doublings in the later version make it safer and more commonplace. Brahms preferred the earlier version – so positively that it led to a serious rift between him and his beloved Clara Schumann, who expressly forbade the publication of the 1841 text. Paradoxically in performance, Gardiner is if anything even more electrifying in the later, more thickly upholstered version, as ever clarifying textures and building up to a thrilling conclusion, with successive accelerandos so daring they have one on the edge of one’s seat.
Even the Zwickauer Symphony of 1832 emerges as very distinctive of Schumann. So much so that one questions the Beethoven parallels drawn in John Daverio’s commentary on it in the booklet. Gardiner rightly performs it without apology, bringing out powerfully in the two completed movements the clear and original anticipations of later Schumann. It is, incidentally, a merit of the layout of the set on three well-filled discs that the eight works appear in chronological order.
The contrasts between Gardiner and Goodman in their approach to the numbered works are not as marked as I expected, often as much a question of scale and recording quality as of interpretative differences, with Goodman’s orchestra more intimate, and with the RCA sound a degree less brightly analytical. Both prefer fast speeds, with Goodman a shade more relaxed and Gardiner more incisive, pressing ahead harder, with syncopations – so important in Schumann – more sharply dramatic.
There is an exception in the last two movements of No. 2, where Gardiner is markedly more expansive in the radiantly lyrical Adagio and less hectic and more joyful in the finale. One advantage that Gardiner has in his slightly bigger scale is that he brings out more light and shade, offering a wider dynamic range. Hence the solemn fourth movement of the Rhenish Symphony inspired by Cologne Cathedral – as with Goodman taken at a flowing speed – builds up more gradually in a bigger, far longer crescendo, in the end the more powerful for being held back at the start.
Though the Goodman set still holds its place in presenting an intensely refreshing view of these masterpieces, Gardiner not only goes a degree further in that process, but offers a conspectus of Schumann as symphonist that is all the richer and more illuminating for the inclusion of the extra rarities. Gardiner concludes his note: “Towards the end of his life Schumann’s four published symphonies were understood by the more perceptive of his contemporaries as constituting the most significant additions to the repertoire since Beethoven. Our aim is to revalidate that claim.” It is hardly too much to suggest that in that he has succeeded triumphantly.'