Czerny’s reputation as the piano pedagogue from hell has overwhelmed his achievement as a serious composer, which is a pity, given the evidence on this recording. His Symphony No. 6, which dates from the early 1850s, reveals about as many progressive tendencies as Bizet’s Symphony in C. Its orientation is thoroughly Classical, even if by this point you might more properly call it “neoclassical”–but that doesn’t make the music less delightful. It sounds most like Mendelssohn, but good Mendelssohn, as in the “Italian” Symphony or the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The strings are very busy in the outer movements, the orchestration is marvelously colorful in its characterful use of woodwinds, and the scherzo is Beethoven at his most giddy. There are no dead spots anywhere, the tunes are very memorable, and you probably will be shocked at just how good the whole thing is.
The same observations apply to the Second Symphony, which is a big work (40 minutes) that wears its length lightly. Czerny obviously didn’t “advance” very much as he aged, but like Bach, he really knew what he wanted and knew exactly how to get it. His inborn sense of order reveals itself not in formal stiffness as much as in the clarity and finish of the music itself. Indeed, if you didn’t know better, you might swear that he was French: he has the sort of polish we find in Saint-Saëns, and I’ve already mentioned Bizet.
There will always be room for finely made music, and these ebullient, fizzy, well-engineered performances by the clearly energized Kaiserslautern orchestra under Grzegorz Nowak make the best possible case for Czerny this side of period instruments. There has been a lot of attention on disc to the music of Beethoven’s contemporaries, including such names as Ries and Wit, and much of it has been very good. Czerny stands with the best.
