Paul WRANITZKY (1756–1808)
Orchestral Works • 2
Der Schreiner
– Overture (1799) [4:19]
Symphonies:
in d minor ‘La Tempesta’ (before 1795) [27:50]
in A Op.16/2 (pub. 1791) [18:01]
in F Op.33/3 (pub. 1798) [23:30]
Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice/Marek Štilec
World premiere recordings
rec. 25–29 November 2019, Dukla Culture House Pardubice, Czech Republic
The scores used for these recordings are available for free download at www.wranitzky.com
Reviewed as downloaded from press preview
NAXOS 8.574255
[73:50]
We have been coming to realise that there are more talented composers who
were contemporary with or who just preceded Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven
than we imagined, and Naxos have not been backward in bringing us
recordings to prove it. With this second release in the Wrantizky series,
they are in many senses returning to their early days, when they brought us
not just popular classics but ground-breaking recordings of
eighteenth-century music, all at a super-budget price of £3.99. To take
just one example, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf had been just a name – if
that – to most of us before Naxos took up his cause. If you didn’t invest
in their recordings of his music, it’s not too late: a good place to start
would be with his Symphonies after Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8.553368
and 8.553369).
That was part of a wider Naxos project entitled ‘The Eighteenth-Century
Symphony’ which contained several valuable recordings. Hanspeter Gmür and
the Failoni Orchestra, Budapest, contributed several other valuable
instalments, such as JC Bach’s Sinfonias, Op.18/1-6 on 8.553367, an alternative to the two works from the set recorded by the Academy of
Ancient Music and Simon Standage on Chandos CHAN0713X –
review
– though, with the latter now at mid-price, the economic advantage is less
than before.
Naxos CDs no longer sell for £3.99, but they remain good value at around
£7.50 – avoid dealers who ask more – with lossless downloads available for
around £5.40, the latter always complete with pdf booklet, which is not
always the case with other labels. Those Dittersdorf recordings were made
with the Failoni Orchestra; it was one of the characteristics of their
early releases that they used lesser-known orchestras, but allowed plenty
of practice time. Now, as with Volume 1, they have returned to Central
Europe for Wranitzky, where he is also known by his Moravian name as Pavel
Vranickı.
I missed Volume 1 when it was released a few months ago on 8.574227 but I
caught up with it via Naxos B2B service and enjoyed hearing it, agreeing
with Rob Barnett, who thought that it enhanced the standing of this
unfamiliar composer –
review.
Both volumes contain world premiere recordings and help to further an
appreciation of a composer otherwise available mainly from the
half-completed Chandos series of recordings ‘Contemporaries of Mozart’.
A Supraphon 2-CD set (SU38752) and a CPO SACD (777054-2 –
review) are also well worth investigating.
Three of his symphonies remain available in fine performances on CHAN9916,
also in an inexpensive 5-CD set CHAN10628X, with Krommer, Carl Stamitz,
Pleyel and Kozeluch. Chandos assembled the whole of the series on USB
CHUSB0018, also in two halves, with the Wranitzky on CHUSB0002, from
chandos.net
for £80 – see
May 2011/2.
And for more information, there’s the Wranitzky project, which offers the
scores of some of his music: wranitzky.com.
The more I hear of Wranitzky’s music, the more I like it, yet he didn’t
even warrant a separate entry in the last complete (2010) edition of the
Penguin Guide, and his name is also absent from the last edition of the
Gramophone Classical Music Guide (2012), though the Chandos recording was
available before either was published. Even having heard the Chandos
recording, I expected to be writing that this is interesting and
entertaining music, but not quite the equal of Haydn, yet in some movements
one might almost be listening to Haydn or even early Mozart.
After the Overture to Der Schreiner (the carpenter) Naxos give us
a symphony so similar in style to Haydn’s Sturm und Drang manner
that I could easily have been fooled into hearing it on the radio and
thinking it was, indeed, a rediscovered Haydn symphony from that period.
It’s the most striking of the three symphonies included here, so it’s not
surprising that it has inspired the cover depiction of a shipwreck. Storm
at sea had already been depicted by Vivaldi (RV253). I had some
reservations about all the ‘special effects’ called upon by Pat
Kopatchinskaja on her recent recording of La tempesta di mare
(Alpha 264 –
review), but the development of the orchestra meant that Wranitzky’s is even more
powerful without any special effects.
As Wranitzky’s storm subsides, the birds start to sing and the symphony
ends with an exuberant coda which anticipates the close of Beethoven’s
Pastoral Symphony from more than 10 years later. It’s amazing that this
symphony exists only in manuscript, was apparently never published, and is
only now receiving its first recording.
The Grande Symphonie
in c minor, Op.31, on the CPO recording, which I couldn’t resist listening to immediately afterwards, spreads its net even wider, from the French Revolution via the Death of Louis XVI and war with the allies to the declaration of peace. If the Storm symphony anticipates Beethoven, this symphony anticipates one of the latter’s other works,
Wellington’s Victory, a minor work which I have always had a soft spot for.
If the other symphonies are not quite as striking as La
Tempesta or the Grande symphonie on CPO, there’s much to enjoy in
them, not least the variations on two well-known tunes in Op.33/3: Freut euch des Lebens in the slow movement and O du Lieber Augustin in the trio of the third movement. The latter
sounds much more jaunty than the original
Augustin can have felt, who, on a drunken night fell into a plague pit and had to be
hauled out the next morning, complete with his bagpipes.
Naxos always got the best out of these lesser-known orchestras by giving
them generous rehearsal time. I presume that to have been the case here
again. Without any benchmarks for comparison, it certainly seems to me that
these recordings are unlikely to be bettered, and the recording quality and
presentation are first-rate. I was going to say that if you fancy a trip
down a side street, this recording is well worth investing in. However,
it’s more than that; far from being a detour off the beaten track,
Wranitzky’s music will take you along the main Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven high
road. As I close this review, I note that Volume 3 is imminent
from the same team.
Brian Wilson
