Dating from 1850 and lasting almost 40 minutes, the F major symphony by Anton Rubinstein is an example of the composer’s mature style. It’s basically an early German Romantic symphony written by a Russian, and was among a group of more than 40 new works the composer showed to Franz Liszt at Weimar in 1854. It’s coupled with Rubinstein’s musical portrait Ivan the Terrible (1869), a work that not only demonstrates a more personally assured, strongly individual idiom, but also is much the better piece of music, offering themes that are often palpably nationalistic in character, but that avoid the crudely explicit manner of Balakirev’s circle.
These accounts by Robert Stankovsky and the Slovak State Philharmonic are not ideal vehicles for this music. The playing is low on both impact and excitement, and the tart woodwinds and acerbic brass can get tedious if you listen at high levels. Stankovsky has considerable feel for these works, however; throughout the symphony he’s adept at underscoring its Mendelssohnian influences–echoes of the “Italian” symphony’s processing pilgrims in the slow movement (placed third, as in the “Scottish”), and fleeting but unmistakable shades of “The Hebrides” in the finale. Ivan the Terrible gets a lumpily uneven reading, and Stankovsky makes the work’s episodic strands seem haphazard as he tries to galvanize his orchestra beyond a fairly complacent level of response. The dry-sounding recording doesn’t help.
