Search - Schumann, Merz Klass Phil Dusseldorf :: Sym #1-4

INSANE!!!!

Wayne A. | Belfast, Northern Ireland | 08/11/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"And so was Schumann. I think this might be a landmark recording, maybe along with Fey's Beethoven on Hannsler: young German conductors going absolutely berserker with the music. This is not period instrument music but it nods to period practices. First thing that wallops one (almsot literally) is the old-style tympani, played like Hector Berlioz is manning the durned thing--almost too loud, I thought at first, but then I got to really enjoying it. Otherwise everywhere contrasts are heightened, the weird items in the orchestration are brought to fore instead of buried, and the overall effect is how radical this music can sound in the right hands. The conductor doesn't go for velocity or contortionism, he shoots for highly caffeinated. It's the best approximation of Schumann's "manic" state that I've ever heard as long as you don't buy the myth that mania is just running around feverishly.



What this reminds me of is some of the more astute presentations of Berlioz--ones that recognize the fact the composer was an avant-garde composer way back when and he wanted everything heard and nothing smoothed out or made superficailly pretty.



This is a tough recommedation. It costs a lot and the people who buy it and like it will love me forever for pointing this out to them, the others will hate it--no middle ground on this one. The more I hear it though the more I'm intuitively convinced that this is what the composer was hearing in his head. Whether you like what Schumann heard in his head is up to you."

Intriguing

David Saemann | 06/12/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This is one of the earliest attempts to play Schumann with a modern orchestra using period instrument practices. The strings are reduced and play without vibrato. The size and configuration of the orchestra corresponds to Schumann's orchestra when he was the conductor in Dusseldorf. David Zinman on Arte Nova has tried the same thing with his Zurich orchestra, but the results in general are not as interesting as on Florian Merz's set. In spite of the wide dyanamics difference between the brass and the rest of the orchestra, the details of Schumann's orchestration always come through. My one caveat about the performances is that Merz's tempos sometimes seem a little sluggish. I don't think you can compare him as a conductor in this music to virtuosi like Szell and Bernstein, but Merz does make his points effectively and clearly has interpreted these works with great scrupulousness. The sound engineering is quite good, too. It's worth knowing that this album contains the recording premiere of a brief work by Schumann for chorus and orchestra that is very enjoyable."

The best complete set of the Symphonies

Eric Zuesse | USA | 10/13/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Florian Merz is more than a wunderkind. Born in 1967, he was only 24 and 25 years of age when he recorded these CD's with this orchestra which he had personally created and organized. He took Schumann as his first recording project. Perhaps that's because the recorded competition on this composer happens to be remarkably weak: there's only one right way to perform Schumann's music, and that's with a maximum of vitality that's combined with a Teutonic severity. Every conductor except Hans Swarowsky has instead performed Schumann only tepidly, and some have combined this limpness with sentimentality. Merz, by contrast, is almost as high-octane as Swarowsky (who unfortunately recorded only one of these symphonies, the "Spring," twice). Furthermore, Schumann's music is also somewhat spastic, with accents popping out this way and that, and so it's very difficult for a performer to sustain the relentless forward motion which is so essential to any successful performance. Schumann's music is super high-energy, and a performer's challenge is always to channel that energy forward, and not in any other direction.



This set introduces to the world a great conductor who just happens to be also a Schumann specialist. It has no close competition.



I hope that this will turn out to be the first of hundreds of recording projects for a young man who, with his first recording project, has already proven himself to be one of the immortals of the orchestral podium."