Swedish Chamber Orchestra - Symphonies - SUPER-AUDIO CD [Super Audio CD (SACD)]

During their long collaboration (1997 - 2019) Thomas Dausgaard and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra developed a project they named 'Opening Doors', performing orchestral works from the Romantic era with the smaller-than-usual forces of a chamber orchestra. Due to the often revelatory results of this approach, the team went on to present at concerts around the world and on several recordings. This box set brings together an important chapter of the project Robert Schumann's orchestral music, symphonies as well as overtures. In addition to his four symphonies - including both versions of No. 4 - this collection presents the Zwickau Symphony, an early, unfinished work from 1832-33, as well as a divertimento-like sequence of movements, Overture, Scherzo and Finale. Of the six overtures included in the set some are well-known, like the overture to Genoveva, Schumann's only opera, and the Manfred Overture which Clara Schumann regarded as 'one of the most poetic and most gripping of Robert's pieces'. Other, less often heard works will constitute pleasant discoveries. The three albums included in the set were greeted with critical acclaim on their individual releases, earning distinctions in magazines such as Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine and Fono Forum. Summing up the cycle, the reviewer in Fanfare described it as 'close to being the most thrilling Schumann symphony series on the market, with sawing violins smoking down to the bridge and timpani-like rifle shots.'

Having begun their collaboration in 1997, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and it's conductor laureate Thomas Dausgaard have developed an unusually tight partnership. Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in their cycles of the symphonies of Schumann, Schubert and, most recently, Brahms - performances which have been characterized by reviewers as variously 'fresh', 'vivid', 'transparent' and 'invigorating'. Of Mendelssohn the team has previously recorded the incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream, a described as 'capturing Mendelssohn's inimitable spirit' on the website Crescendo. The same disc included The Hebrides, and now the SCO and Dausgaard return to Scotland, with Mendelssohn's 'Scottish' Symphony. This was begun in 1829, after a stay in London during which the composer conducted his Symphony No. 1, also included on this disc. Mendelssohn's imagination was often fired by impressions from nature, and Scotland was the Romantic landscape par excellence, celebrated for it's rugged Highland scenery and melancholy tunes. 'I think that today I found the beginning of my 'Scottish' Symphony', he wrote to his parents after a visit to the ruined chapel at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. It took more than a decade for him to complete the symphony - but ever since it's first performance, in 1842, it has been a staple of the symphonic repertoire.

Although Kurt Weill's principal legacy lies in music theatre works of both popular appeal and intellectual weight, he was equally at home in purely orchestral works as evidenced by his two symphonies. Written just over a decade apart, they reveal his chameleon-like ability to work with any range of style and form. The Symphonie in einem Satz (Symphony in one movement), completed when he was barely 21, adopts an expressionist idiom that shows intricate writing, dense counterpoint and quick shifts reminiscent of Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony. Completed in France in 1934 after Weill had to flee Nazi Germany, the Fantaisie symphonique is filled with allusions to the 'sung ballet' The Seven Deadly Sins, composed at the same time. Opening the programme is a selection from the 'play with music' Der Silbersee (The Silver Lake), a commentary on commercial greed. As in The Threepenny Opera, the vocal parts were composed for singing actors rather than opera singers. Steeped in the world of Weill, conductor, composer and chansonnier HK Gruber performs the songs himself in his own inimitable way, giving an unusual authenticity to the interpretations.