Spohr has two enthusiastic modern advocates in Karl Anton Rickenbacher, with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (Orfeo), and Alfred Walter, with what is, at any rate for the moment, the Czecho-Slovak State Philharmonic Orchestra based at Kosice in far eastern Slovakia. They have recorded several of his symphonies; and there is also a good version of the Third by Leopold Hager (Amati), in a rather odd coupling with Bruckner's G minor Overture and Schumann's Cello Concerto (though Schumann did admire its ''earnest solemnity''). If the recorded sound is rather strident, the new performance is a fine one, suggesting the romantic world of the Scottish Symphony by one of Spohr's admirers and a frequent conductor of this very symphony, Felix Mendelssohn. Of all Spohr's symphonies, this is the one which most deserves restoration to the concert repertory.
It is not so easy to defend the Historical Symphony except as a historical curiosity, though Keith Warsop makes out an interesting case for it in the notes to this record. Briefly, he argues that the Bach-Handel movement exemplifies Spohr's strong moral attitudes to life and art; that the Haydn-Mozart movement represents Spohr's ideal state, that the Beethoven movement is the heroic throwing off of Napoleon, and that the most problematic movement of all, when Spohr mocks all that he detested in modern music, derides the petty tyrannies of Metternich's Europe. Well, it is a nice idea, and makes more sense of the work that hearing it as a series of parodies, but it takes more than that to justify the artistic muddle of the finale, or indeed the success with which Spohr makes other styles mean something in the context of his own style. For the curious, though, here is a good account of a strange enterprise.'