BBC Legends BBCL 4213-2, 73:53 (Distrib. Koch) ****:
Danzig-born conductor Carl Schuricht (1880-1967) shares a program with Sir Adrian Boult (1889-1983) in music mutually essential to their repertory. Schuricht appears with the London Symphony in concert 31 January 1964, near the end of a long and distinguished career that had established him as an exponent of the Great German Tradition. A former pupil of composer Max Reger, Schuricht brings an especial sympathy to the Variations on a Merry Tune of Ferdinand Hiller, a piece whose opening motifs echo something of Weinberger’s Schwanda the Bagpiper. What impresses about the opening foray into the D Minor Tragic Overture of Brahms is its unforced, natural contours, how each of its three sections proceeds without clamor and unseemly histrionics, yet still conveys grace and power.
Reger’s music borrows much from Brahms; and listening to the Hiller Variations, we feel the D Major Serenade of Brahms casts a sunny glance at every bar. The serenity of orchestral discipline gratifies most consistently in this realization, the textural admixture of winds, horns, and feisty strings. No natural melodist, Reger derives his lasting powers from color, harmonization, and his sense for unity-in-variety. The Variation 5, Andante sostenuto, stands as a bucolic testament to the lyricism which Reger could command when not a strictly a Brahms clone. The massive fugue, for all of its contrapuntal dexterity, never escapes the Weinberger sonority whose playful ethos keeps the work from sinking of its own pedagogical weight.
Sir Adrian Boult owed to German conducting debts via Artur Nikisch and Fritz Steinbach, the latter of whom affected Toscanini’s vision of Brahms. The 19 August 1968 Great Fugue emit’s a lithe energy, now strict, now free, often in stringent, febrile textures typical of Boult’s driving, broadly-proportioned Beethoven style. This Royal Albert Hall performance had a life on the Intaglio label, coupled with Beethoven’s Emperor Joseph Cantata under Sir Colin Davis. Its appearance here on BBC is most welcome, an electrically tense rendering of a visceral piece of musical cerebration.
— Gary Lemco
