“In my salad days when I was green in judgement” I would have considered this love child of Bruckner and Richard Strauss as orchestration all dressed up with nowhere to go. As a more mature listener, I loved this symphony.

Poor Franz Schmidt was forever doomed to be eclipsed by Strauss and Bruckner, though his music lacks Strauss’s hothouse chromaticism and Bruckner’s rhetoric, while also avoiding Mahler’s neuraesthenic contortions. The music also lacks what the Viennese call Schwung (roughly “oomph” in English). The only problem is a...