This deluxe set comes with everything: two regular CDs plus a Blu-ray disc featuring the complete symphonies in that format, plus one of those “making of” videos with interviews and all kinds of musically irrelevant nonsense. The album is a large, hardcover rectangle that will fit nowhere except on your coffee table, and that is surely where it belongs, as evidence of your superior taste. The booklet contains fulsome notes including the scoring of each symphony, a rather pointless exercise since, with the exception of the triangle in the first movement of the “Spring” Symphony, it’s the same in all four. Nevertheless, the whole is beautiful and very classy, no doubt about it. You also get a promotional limited-access pass to the Berlin Philharmonic’s online streaming concert service.
In short it’s all here, except for a great set of Schumann symphonies; and if that’s what you were expecting beyond a circa $60 display of wealth and taste on your coffee table, you will be disappointed. The booklet notes make much of the orchestra’s Schumann “tradition”, dating back to the 1880s. This is bunk. Orchestral traditions in specific repertoire rest on two principal factors: the affinity of the conductor for the work, and the training of the players. The only conductor who led this orchestra for a sufficiently long period of time to create a characteristic sound was Karajan, and his Schumann cycle is simply horrible in every possible and several impossible ways.
As for playing traditions, Claudio Abbado replaced two thirds of the orchestra’s personnel a couple of decades ago. He was not concerned with maintaining the style of some alleged German school to any detectable degree. Indeed the Berlin Philharmonic, in seeking out the world’s best players and advertising itself accordingly, has made it a point not to care about such notions, which are in fact incompatible with attracting the most talented musicians irrespective of “school”. The orchestra never has cultivated a regional accent such as we find, say, in Vienna, Prague, or (formerly) Paris. So forget about any proprietary claims to the repertoire. They are a myth and a promotional convenience, nothing more, especially given the fact that Simon Rattle is the last conductor we would expect to reveal a special affinity for Schumann.
That doesn’t mean that these are bad performances; the orchestra is too competent for that. But they lack Bernstein’s ebullience and gravity, Zinman’s transparency and period-influenced lightness, Barenboim’s genuine feel for the German tradition, Sawallisch’s easy spontaneity, Muti’s rhythmic kick–I could go on. While Rattle makes a serious effort to invest the finales with an extra jolt of energy, the playing elsewhere often sounds tired: consider the mechanically dull violins in the scherzo of the Second Symphony, or the first-movement exposition of the “Spring” Symphony–its initial thrust only fitfully sustained. Taken on its own terms it’s really not bad, but compared to the best of the competition, there’s nothing special going on.
Rattle is himself to blame for much of this, clearly. He makes nothing of big moments such as the horn calls in the “Rhenish” Symphony’s first movement, and the second-movement Ländler has no lilt thanks to a tempo that’s patently too quick. He often encourages the orchestra to taper phrase-endings in a bad parody of period-instrument practice, as in the same symphony’s finale. Rattle claims to be using the earlier, 1841 version of the Fourth Symphony, but this is only partially true. A glance at that score reveals considerable textual retouching in this performance, from added timpani in the scherzo to doubling of the winds with strings in the coda of the finale–it sounds almost like Tchaikovsky. Rattle actually seems to be using 19th-century conductor Franz Wüllner’s bowdlerized version of the original 1841 score, inexcusable when a Critical Edition is readily available from Breitkopf & Härtel. Did Rattle even know?
If you want to hear the Berlin Philharmonic play a complete Schumann cycle, both Rafael Kubelik and James Levine offer better alternatives. The problem with vanity productions such as this is that they tend to be driven by the well-staffed and well-funded PR departments of major performing arts organizations. Those folks are all too willing to believe their own hype, and they too often neither know nor care about the discographies of the works they choose to release and then need to promote. In the musical bubble which constitutes their world, the only real challenge to the Berlin Philharmonic is the Berlin Philharmonic, right? This production is all about the attempt to sustain a false historical narrative about the orchestra and its conductor. It certainly is not about great Schumann playing and conducting, but that is what you get when you let the inmates run the asylum: a musical non-happening in an expensive but gorgeous package.
