Editor’s Choice, Orchestral – July 2016

Back in 2013 oboist-composer-conductor Heinz Holliger, in partnership with the excellent WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln and featuring an august cast of instrumental soloists – violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and pianist Dénes Várjon included – initiated a project to record Robert Schumann’s complete orchestral music. The sixth and final volume contrasts Schumann’s first tentative stab at a symphony – the two-movement torso Zwickauer Symphony – with tautly conceived late-period overtures from the ever popular Manfred to the rarer Julius Caesar and Bride of Messina.

No man or woman alive knows more about the inner-workings of Schumann’s music than Holliger, but his cycle hasn’t always been consistent in the listening. It was Holliger’s bad luck that his first three volumes were released just as Simon Rattle, Robin Ticciati and Yannick Nézet-Séguin released their own symphony cycles and DG sneaked out Abbado’s second. Compared to the lavishly nuanced detail of Rattle and Ticciati’s poetic intensity, Holliger generates a plainer surface – the Second Symphony’s Scherzo lacks Rattle’s skittish momentum and his reading of the Rhenish is no match for Ticciati’s unhinged volatility.

But the weight of Holliger’s scholarly learning can’t be dismissed....