This Johan Svendsen trilogy from Chandos comes with its own mystery
duo. Firstly, what happened to volume four - promised on the release
of the first disc last year, but now, according to volume three's
blurb, no longer planned? Second, and more significantly, what motivated
Chandos to make these recordings? Svendsen was already well served
discographically - at least on a par with his historical importance
- and Neeme Järvi has already recorded much of his music for
BIS with the very same orchestra! To cap it all, Chandos already have
Svendsen's symphonies in their catalogue, in perfectly good accounts
given a decade ago by Thomas Dausgaard with the Danish National Symphony
Orchestra (
review);
not mention those by
Jansons
and
Rasilainen.
Critical reports on all the above have been good, so a desire to sweep
average competition aside cannot have been the motivation. What then?
Not, somewhat surprisingly, audio quality: despite Chandos's '24-bit/96
Khz' boast, there is nothing exceptional to be heard here. In fact,
there is some audio compression in evidence, manifesting itself most
blatantly in the muddiness of the string section, and with no improvement
by volume 3.
Whilst it would be churlish to criticise Chandos, a label that has
done much sterling and pioneering work in renovating or unearthing
previously neglected composers from Scandinavia and elsewhere, it
is hard in this instance not to wish that the resources made available
for these three discs had been deployed elsewhere.
For those not wanting to commit to the full complement, volume 2 offers
Svendsen at his most original and entertaining. The two Norwegian
Rhapsodies see him at his most attractively nationalistic, whilst
Truls Mørk is a persuasive advocate of the short, subtle but
always deeply lyrical cello concerto. The Second Symphony is one of
Svendsen's finest works, and one of the most original Norwegian symphonies
of the 19th century - albeit without a huge amount of competition.
Svendsen's First, on volume 3, is a lesser work by comparison, though
still far from negligible. For lighter but colourful fare, volume
1 has most to offer, and by way of bonus includes Svendsen's best-known
work, the lilting violin
Romanze op.26, and, above all, the
other two memorable
Norwegian Rhapsodies.
In performance terms, the Bergen Philharmonic under Neeme Järvi
are hard to beat, particularly in Scandinavian repertoire, as their
4-disc series for Chandos of Svendsen's younger contemporary Johan
Halvorsen's music, recorded at more or less the same time as their
Svendsen, testifies (
review).
Järvi's BIS recording of Svendsen's symphonies (CD-347) dates
from the 1980s and the sound quality, despite BIS's reputation, is
fairly shabby. Dausgaard's for Chandos (CHAN 9932) was made twenty
years later and is an improvement, but no better than the Järvis
under review. The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra's recording of both
symphonies under Bjarte Engeset for Naxos (8.553898), released in
1998, gives the best value for money in terms of combined audio and
performance fidelity. Overall, though - for variety of programme,
generosity of running-time, and quality of interpretation - these
Chandos discs are a reliable investment, especially for those without
exalted audiophile tendencies.
The standard of the trilingual booklets is as high as usual, as is
the amount of paper wasted by the extraordinary width of Chandos's
margins. Notes do have a slight foreign accent, nowhere more so than
in the translated title of
Sæterjentens Søndag,
'The Girl's Sunday on the Mountain Pasture', which misleadingly implies
that the girl in question spent Sunday on a mountain pasture - in
the Norwegian, in fact, mountain pasture (or farm) is a characteristic
of the girl, not her Sunday. The notes do, however, give a reasonably
detailed account of each piece.
Byzantion
Collected reviews and contact at artmusicreviews.co.uk
See also reviews of Volume 1 by Jonathan
Woolf and Volume 2 by Nick
Barnard.
