There’s some very attractive music here, but unfortunately the biggest piece isn’t the most interesting. Karlowicz’s “Rebirth” Symphony, like so many late Romantic effusions, doesn’t know exactly what it wants to be. On the one hand, we have an ambitious, heroic, striving piece that wins its way through to a triumphant ending, but on the other hand the restrained orchestral writing undermines the music’s clear intent. Granted this is only his Op. 7, but what Brahms understood and Karlowicz evidently did not, is that if you are going to use instrumental color with such restraint in this sort of emotional context, you have to compensate with correspondingly tight structural control. Absent that you get Karlowicz’s finale: ten minutes of “sound and fury signifying nothing” preceded by an incongruously Mendelssohnian scherzo. A few melodramatic cymbal crashes and harp glissandos would have gone a long way to making this music more convincing.
Take, for example, the lovely symphonic prologue Bianca da Molena–one opus number earlier than the symphony but miles more advanced in purely coloristic terms and packing more thematic interest into its eleven minutes than the symphony does in nearly forty. The Serenade for Strings similarly shows a perfect alliance of matter and method, its four charming movements revealing a sure compositional hand allied to characterful ideas. All of the performances sound highly professional, and one certainly can’t fault either Noseda or the BBC Philharmonic for the relatively flat impression left by the symphony. Chandos’ sonics similarly uphold their generally high standard in productions from this particular source. I truly wish I could be more enthusiastic about this disc as a whole, but Volume One in this series was a lot more fun.
