Georg Schumann Symphonie op 42 - Ouvertures Feddeck - CPO555110 - CPO - Classique - Nos labels

Qui d’autre que CPO pourrait se pencher sur les œuvres de Georg Schumann ? Ce musicien berlinois a laissé deux symphonies (la première déjà enregistrée par le même label) dont voici la seconde. Vaste partition où passent les ombres de Brahms et Wagner, improbable synthèse possible en 1905… Rien de Strauss ou de Mahler toutefois dans cette construction solide mais manquant un peu de personnalité. Deux ouvertures assez conventionnelles, l’une tragique, l’autre joyeuse, complètent ce portrait d’un compositeur assez oublié. L’interprétation est à l’image des œuvres, solide mais sans imagination particulière. Tout n’est pas de la même eau dans ce que révèle CPO de ce répertoire marginal parallèle aux deux grands compositeurs cités ci-dessus. Georg Schumann ne vaut pas Siegmund von Hausegger, en attendant enfin que CPO s’attelle aux plus grandes pages inédites de l’époque, la Herbstsymphonie de Joseph Marx et, surtout, la démesurée Gloria Symphonie de Jean-Louis Nicodé. (Richard Wander)

Georg Schumann is known to the cpo listening audience from our releases of his chamber music, songs, and first symphony, the »Praise Symphony.« One critic wrote in a very positive review of the symphony that it had made him eager for further discoveries. And so now here it is: our second CD with symphonic works by Georg Schumann, who was the director of the Sing-Akademie in Berlin for many years and a professor of composition at the Prussian Academy of the Arts. He is currently being rediscovered as a late romanticist, but during his lifetime he was regarded as a neoromanticist. The Symphony in F minor is his most monumental instrumental work. Minor composers typically adhere rather mechanically to the classical, four-movement symphonic form. But this does not at all apply to Georg Schumann! He has the scherzo third movement go over into the fourth and last movement without a break while taking the traditional mirth and sparkle of the scherzo into a gloomier sphere. And what one critic wrote of the symphony of his youth also is above all true here: »… how one idea logically develops from the other.« The recording also includes two of Georg Schumann’s overtures. He was able to express all the moods in music – and this is his claim to greatness. After the weighty »Prelude to a Drama« he wrote a joyous celebration of life in the »Lebensfreude« overture, a work overflowing with delight in musical performance.