Published Reviews
By Chris Morgan
Scene Magazine
21-Jun-2012
Born on the cusp of the 20th century, Erich Korngold was a child prodigy and a man creatively out of his time. Eventually he found a home in Hollywood, where he distinguished himself as a film composer, well-known for his work on the 1938 swashbuckling classic, The Adventures of Robin Hood. Upon hearing Ondine’s recently released recording of his Symphony in F sharp, Op. 40, it’s easy to understand why he would have found success writing for the silver screen. His music is expressive, occasionally euphoric, and genuinely evocative. Even when that colourful grandeur fades, as it does in the symphony’s Adagio-Lento, there is still compelling gravitas, a quality of apprehension fully realized in the movement’s somber, funerary conclusion. © 2012 Scene Magazine Read complete review
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By Ronald E. Grames
Fanfare
01-Sep-2011
For a work that had such a difficult start, the Erich Korngold Symphony in F♯-Major has done remarkably well on CD, with eight additional recordings since the 1992 Varèse Sarabande reissue of Kempe’s 1972 concert premiere. Its time, it would seem, has finally come. The symphony, on which the composer labored for five years, first appeared in 1954 on an Austrian Radio broadcast. It was met with supreme indifference. Though it was undermined by a poorly prepared performance, the real problem was the now passé Korngold style. Everything but Korngold had changed. European audiences, left destitute and demoralized by two world wars, had little use for his revivals of Belle Époque glories. True, Dmitri Mitropoulos was much taken with the work, but he died in 1960 before he could take it up. Korngold was gone by then, as well. Few would have predicted that the work could survive.
Korngold’s 12 years of service to Warner Brothers hadn’t, at least until recently, put him in good stead with classical music critics, either. Yet to dismiss his symphony as reworked film music is to miss the obvious: Korngold brought that style to Hollywood. It was in every sense his to use as surely as Beethoven’s, and Mahler’s, and Strauss’s styles belong to them. He actually uses themes from five of his film scores in the symphony, seemingly bent on proving to the world that the music he had written for Hollywood, work forced upon him by circumstance, had in it the same qualities for which he had been celebrated in his youth. The failure of this attempt to regain the European career he was forced to flee in 1938 crushed his already fragile health—he was suffering from heart disease—and he only finished two more works, both written for school orchestras, in the time that remained to him after that premiere broadcast. He died in 1957 at age 60, in Hollywood, far from the Vienna he had hoped to reconquer.
The symphony was initially rejected both for its “atonality” and for being like Mahler. It is neither, though it is certainly chromatic and shares Mahler’s penchant for expansive and sometimes challengingly unconventional structures. It has a chameleon-like ability to sound very different, and fully persuasive, in a variety of interpretations. Franz Welser-Möst (EMI), with quick tempos—he is the only conductor to come close to Korngold’s 14-minute estimate for the Adagio movement—creates a distinctly modern impression: angular, often aggressive—most notably in the martial sections of the first movement—and never sentimental. On the opposite extreme is Edward Downes’s opulent late-romantic traversal on Chandos, especially effective in bringing out the dark Brucknerian influences in the expansive treatment of that same Adagio and the Straussian undercurrents elsewhere. André Previn’s more deliberate, sometimes brooding treatment on DG (out of print except via ArkivMusic) emphasizes the film score origins, comore....
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By Adrian Edwards
Gramophone
01-Sep-2011
Korngold’s ripe, romantic symphony and an old-style dance’s premiere recording
This new CD joins a select handful of fine recordings of this late Romantic symphony, of which Marc Albrecht’s vibrant account is still fresh in the mind. As an ensemble, there’s no doubt that the Helsinki Philharmonic is on a par with Albrecht’s Strasbourg orchestra but John Storgårds makes heavy weather of Korngold’s writing, stretching out the long paragraphs on his broad symphonic canvas to the point where the symphony often seems becalmed, the ideas outstaying their welcome. Instead of drawing in the composer’s prolix writing, Storgårds is indulgent to the point where each new idea seems over-parted from the last.
Dance in the Old Style, scored for a smaller ensemble, is a charming antidote to what has gone before. This work from the youthful Korngold (in its world premiere recording) inhabits the world of Strauss’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme so, although there are no characteristic grand romantic gestures, the orchestra play this dance with an affection and lightness of touch that makes it fresh and appealing.
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