What a magnificent score Suk’s A Summer’s Tale
is! By turns rapturous, ecstatic, grief-ridden and serene it
is an undoubted masterpiece. This performance from a clearly
inspired BBC Symphony Orchestra under their departing principal
conductor Jiří Bĕlohlávek rises to the
challenge of capturing the shifting and elusive sound-world
as well as any. I listened to this performance in its standard
CD format but if every there was a recording to tempt me to
splash out on a Super Audio compatible system this might be
it. The Chandos engineers and production team have produced
one of their very finest discs and it sounds simply ravishing.
The Watford Colosseum has a naturally generous and resonant
acoustic that record companies have used over the years to create
impressive recordings but I am not sure I have ever heard a
better one from that venue where weight and richness of orchestral
sound is balanced with superb detail and a wholly believable
perspective. Indeed I would go as far to say this is the finest
recorded performance I have heard from Bĕlohlávek
too. The reason I used the word elusive is simple; composed
between 1907-09, A Summer’s Tale sits on that fascinating
musical cusp between the end of Romanticism and the dawn of
the modern age with the mainstreams of classical music dividing
into Impressionism, the second Viennese/serial school and various
variants of Modernism, Post-Romanticism and the rest. Not that
Suk was interested in creating a new sound for a new sound’s
sake. Instead he took what he wanted and needed from the various
compositional ‘schools’ and created a uniquely personal
sound-world. The fact that in it one hears echoes of other styles
and influences means it requires a clear and strong musical
personality to bind the possibly disparate elements together.
Suk’s personal and professional career is easily and neatly
divisible into two all but equal parts. The first thirty years
of his life show him learning his craft both as a leading violinist
and composer and finding great personal happiness professionally
and personally through his association with Antonín Dvořák
and his marriage to the older composer’s daughter. The
well documented double tragedy of their deaths in 1904 changed
his life forever. The remaining thirty-one years of Suk’s
life were a reaction to that loss as he threw himself into composition,
performance and teaching. As a composer Suk’s oeuvre is
relatively small; give or take a dozen CDs would give you a
near complete collection evenly split between orchestral, chamber
and piano music. Yet what it lacks in quantity is more than
accounted for in quality. The group of orchestral works is a
case in point. Dominating it are the tetralogy of works that
Suk himself saw as being linked and a direct response to the
loss of his beloved teacher and wife. The first and most famous
is the Asrael Symphony written in the aftermath of the
double loss. It remains as powerful a musical documentation
of pain, loss and grief as any piece of music. All the more
remarkable is the final positive affirmation through which one
feels Suk found the strength to go on. The fact that the final
panel of this deeply autobiographical cycle was not completed
until the year before his death proves how important and lasting
this musical subject was to him. A Summer’s Tale
is the second, and is sub-titled Symphonic Poem. Look
a little closer, and for the moment ignoring the five movement
titles, and I do not think it is too hard to perceive another
four part symphony here. As such it is beautifully proportioned:
two outer movements playing for around the quarter hour mark
with a two-part ‘slow movement’ second, and a scherzo
third with each of those playing for eleven to twelve minutes.
All of which makes for a very substantial work playing for nearly
fifty-five minutes - a much larger work than the implicit ‘lightness’
of its title. With all the demands made on his time Suk often
had to use his summer holidays as an opportunity to compose.
So A Summer’s Tale was written in just six weeks
during the summer of 1907 and was tinkered with for a further
two years until its first performance in 1909. Graham Melville-Mason’s
concise but excellent liner-note neatly summarises the work.
In a speech in 1932 Suk said; “[it is about] finding a
soothing balm in nature [after the cruel events that inspired
the Asrael Symphony] …. After wild fleeing I find
consolation in nature … the exalted jubilation of the
first movement, the hymn to the sun in the second, compassion
for those who can never see this [the third movement is entitled
Blind Musicians], storm and wild longing in the fourth
… give way in the final movement to the mystical calm
of night”. I quote that at length simply because it encapsulates
the essential moods of the various parts of the work far better
than I ever could!
Suk writes for a large late romantic orchestra - with triple
wind and extended brass together with two harps and piano. Certainly
this makes for an exciting and powerful sound when all the forces
are unleashed together but it is the refinement and skill of
the orchestration that lingers in the memory. Bĕlohlávek’s
is supremely skillful at bringing out the subtle nuance of the
music and his BBC players respond with playing that is rich
and full or flexible and subtle as required. Again they are
helped greatly by the range of the Chandos recording which allows
interesting touches in the scoring to register subtly yet clearly.
This is a work that reveals more delicious detail with every
re-listening. If you respond to the heated emotional sound-world
of Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau or Schoenberg's
Pelleas
und Melisandethis will appeal to you but much
as I enjoy the Zemlinsky in particular I would have to say I
find the Suk to be the more deeply personal and ultimately impressive
work. The opening movement Voices of Love and Consolation
is the most overtly romantic and exuberant and the BBCSO rise
to the considerable technical challenges of the piece with virtuosic
panache. Suk might have been a violinist himself but he certainly
did not choose to write easily for his own instrument. The brass
throughout the entire disc are a model of powerful burnished
beauty and the woodwind are simply glorious. An especial highlight
is the unusual third movement scored for two cor anglais, two
harps, solo violin and viola and strings. As previously mentioned
this is titled Blind Musicians and originated as part
of the incidental music Suk had written for a play earlier in
1907. The two cor players are named as Alison Teale and Helen
Vigurs and rightly so. In the midst of playing of such quality
their contribution stands out as exceptionally fine. There is
a sinuous almost sensual ebb and flow to their interplay aided
by richly bardic harps and similarly beautiful string solos
that makes for an exceptional passage of music making which
again belies the diminutive implication of its Intermezzo
title. The scherzo is an oddly modernist ‘night-music’
titled In the power of phantoms - fascinating to realise
that Mahler’s 7th Symphony - although written
between 1904-6 had to wait for its premiere, in Prague, in 1908.
One wonders if Suk attended that premiere and any of that work’s
sound-world leaked into the final emendations of his own score.
Suk manages to find both consolation and reconciliation in the
final section which is simply called Night andmakes
for an emotionally satisfying conclusion to the work in its
own right. His revisiting of the loss and hurt through Ripening
in 1912-17 and Epilogue in 1920-33 suggests there were
emotional scars that ran deeper than any single work could heal.
If this is a work you have yet to encounter and large-scale
scores of the period appeal than this should be placed high
on any wish-list.
The coupling on this extremely generously filled disc is the
earlier Symphonic Poem Prague. Considerately Chandos
have split the work into four tracks but in fact this is a ‘traditional’
symphonic poem cast in an extended single movement form. It
‘feels’ like a more traditional work too - a simplistic
comparison might be to say it could be another movement from
Smetana’s Ma Vlast although written in a slightly
more modernist idiom. Suk’s use of ancient Hussite chorales
and the festive orchestration featuring organ and bells makes
this a more public and occasional piece. Important to note however,
that it was the work Suk had been planning at the time of the
double deaths and the one into which he threw himself as a means
of diverting his attention from the otherwise all-consuming
grief he felt. From a musicological perspective it is fascinating
to hear the change these losses brought about in the compositional
style and vocabulary both melodic and harmonic that Suk used
either side of 1904. That it is a ‘lesser’ work
than A Summer’s Tale is clear but in its own right
it is hugely enjoyable and receives another splendid performance
full of swagger and panache with the final peroration of the
organ proving once again the demonstration-disc qualities of
the recording.
This is Bĕlohlávek’s second Suk disc with
the BBC SO for Chandos. He has previously recorded with the
Czech Philharmonic on the same label other well-received performances
of Suk including Asrael, A Fairy Tale and the
delightfully sunny string Serenade. Much as I have enjoyed
all of those performances this new disc strikes me as the best
by some distance. Now here comes a quirk - given the total praise
I have for this disc readers might assume a simple shoe-in as
far as ‘best version’ is concerned. Not so - after
decades when the brilliant but murky Talich recordings were
one’s only option, in recent years Suk has been rather
lucky on disc with a series of devoted and fine conductors producing
a series of excellent recordings. Indeed, A Summer’s
Tale seems to have inspired the best out of those performers
in turn. I have been listening to four other versions: two from
Libor Pešek - one in early slightly glassy Supraphon DDD
with the Czech Philharmonic and the other from Virgin (VC 7243
5 45057) with the RLPO, one on Naxos from Andrew
Mogrelia and lastly Charles Mackerras on Decca (466 443-2)
again with the Czech PO. If you own any of those performances
- only Pešek
on Supraphon is identically coupled - you will have a good
performance. Possibly the Mogrelia is the least amongst equals
but his Slovak Radio SO have a suitably idiomatic sound if not
the finesse or recording quality of the new disc. Fairly routine
searching of the web throws up copies to be had at bargain prices
and I have a particular affection for Pešek in Liverpool
proving yet again what a fine orchestra they were in the years
BP (before Petrenko). That is before one even mentions the extraordinarily
fine and characterful performance by Charles Mackerras. The
Czech Philharmonic is one of a handful of the world’s
great orchestras who still have a specific sound. They have
this music in their bones and they have a blended more homogeneous
timbre - in part defined by the acoustic of the Rudolfinum in
Prague - that fits the music like a glove. The Mackerras coupling
is the interesting but slighter Fantastic Scherzo.
Sometimes it seems foolish to have multiple versions of a work
- in this case I would argue that such is the quality of the
music and music-making here that a duplication should be considered
if the work features in your collection already. If not, do
not hesitate, as the year is turning inexorably towards toward
Autumn one last backward glance to Summer seems wholly appropriate.
Music and a performance that resonates long in the memory -
a strong contender for Disc of the Year status.
Nick Barnard
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Jiří Bĕlohlávek 
[79:32] 