Bruno Walter (1876-1962) was best remembered at one time for the stereo recordings made for Columbia in his Indian Summer. These are generally less fiery, perhaps due to his having had a major heart attack in 1957, than earlier mono versions, where the easy-going gentility is less evident than a passion which surprises listeners used only to the stereo ones.
Walter was a child prodigy, born in Berlin as Bruno Schlesinger, changing his name when moving in 1896 to the orchestra in Breslau, a post for which his friend Mahler recommended him. He wrote the first of two symphonies during 1906 and 1907, the second not long after, but after conducting the premiers of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony, he composed no more.
Walter played through the symphony for his old friend Mahler in September 1907 and got a lukewarm reception. After the premier, Julius Korngold – writing as critic for the Vienna paper Neue Freie Presse – was not encouraging, critical of “modernist tendencies” and what he called Walter’s note-spinning. Walter conducted the work a second time in Strasbourg, but it was not until 2004 when it got its third performance under Botstein in New York with the American Symphony Orchestra, an orchestra which has also very recently given a rare performance of Joseph Marx’s Ein Herbstsymphonie.
This substantial symphony is written in a late-romantic, or post-romantic idiom, and shows Walter to be capable of writing fiery and passionate music. This is no clone of a Mahler work, though there are passing hints; with all of Walter’s contact with Mahler this is almost to be expected. Nor is this work a chimera of Richard Strauss, Alexander Zemlinsky and Max Reger, though there again there are hints of those were one to be guessing the composer. Walter certainly has his own voice; whether it is a strong one is another matter.
The first movement opens quietly but soon the pent-up energy erupts into a well-thought out sizeable movement. The second, slow movement has its moments of reverie, the third an energetic waltz with trio, and the last powerful one marked agitato, with a big finish one would have thought would produce a sure-fire ovation! New to me, as this is the first recording, this work has made very rewarding listening over the past three weeks.
Leon Botstein produces committed playing from his Hamburg orchestra, and the recording quality is, on the whole, very good; only in the most thickly scored tutti do the clouds come down a bit, limiting one’s vision.
I do hope Marx’s symphony gets its recording premier from CPO; in the meantime, this recording of Bruno Walter’s First Symphony is most enthusiastically welcomed and recommended.
— Peter Joelson
