Wow! I thought to myself, a new Dvorák symphony cycle from a conductor I have always enjoyed for his snappy sense of rhythm and ability to generate excitement and tension. To call this flabbily conducted, indifferently played, and dryly recorded set disappointing would be a huge understatement. It has a few good moments. The Fifth Symphony isn’t bad, and if Leonard Bernstein on DG couldn’t kill the “New World” Symphony, then Vladimír Válek certainly isn’t going to. But in all other respects, every work has a movement or two that stands among the worst on disc, and always for the same reasons: slack tempos, rigid rhythms, and careless ensemble, with coarse brass and sloppy strings.
In the First Symphony, both the slow movement and finale die on the vine. The last two movements of the Second are all but unlistenable. The finale of the Third is simply atrocious, at a speed so slow that it’s trance-inducing, and Válek seems to have not a clue as to how to conceal the repetitiveness of the similar movement in the Fourth. There’s nothing distinguished at all about the Seventh in any of its movements. Where, for heaven’s sake do the horns go at the climax of the first movement? The Eighth Symphony’s coda sounds less like a fairground celebration than a work stoppage in a tractor factory: Valék’s stiffness and lack of joy has a positively industrial quality, as though the entire exercise were uninteresting and merely mechanical.
There’s little need to go on. For every moment of insight (and there are a few: the clarity of the bass lines, for example, reveals some interesting motivic work that usually gets covered up), there are many more examples of carelessness or indifference. Frankly, you would be hard pressed to declare these performances Czech, so far do they stand outside Dvorák’s idiom, or indeed from the basic musicality that we have come to expect. This release does no credit to Supraphon, to Dvorák, or to the ongoing tradition of excellence that we’re used to hearing in home-grown performances of this music. What a pity!
