Hans Rott’s single symphony enjoys what little attention it gets solely by virtue of the fact that it sounds like anyone but Hans Rott. There’s the Bruckner/Mahler scherzo, the Brahms First Symphony tune in the finale, the Wagnerian ending: whether or not Rott did some of these things first hardly matters because everyone else did them better. Perhaps his only original contribution to the proceedings other than the decision to mix this particular heterogeneous brew is an obbligato triangle part of positively stupefying persistence.
The best performance of this historical curiosity–admittedly a fun one if you like to play musical detective–remains Leif Segerstam’s on BIS. Dennis Russell Davies conducts with his usual efficiency, but the second movement surely isn’t an Adagio and the conductor seems a touch embarrassed by the finale’s plagiaristic excesses. I mean, if you aren’t going to go for broke, what’s the point? Segerstam also balances his ensemble with a keener ear for the distinction between melody and accompaniment (check out the opening of the rollicking scherzo) and has a far more sensitive, and by this I mean unobtrusive, triangle player (believe me, you’ll be grateful by the work’s end). This is by no means a bad performance: it’s much better than the two previous recordings on Centaur and Hyperion. But if you want to hear this symphony at all, you owe it to yourself to get the best because it’s not exactly the sort of piece you’ll want to collect in multiple versions.
Uniquely, Davies does offer a coupling: Rott’s goofy Pastorales Vorspiel, possibly the most structurally dysfunctional piece of music ever conceived, even for an era in which considerations of formal coherence seldom dominated most composers’ thoughts. It consists primarily of a sequence of introductions that warble, twitter, and meander randomly along for about 10 minutes, after which for no particular reason a numbingly formulaic fugue leads to an endless pedal point over which percussion (who don’t seem to much care if they play together or not) crash in with a hopelessly vulgar coda (appalling treatment of the trombones) that refuses to quit just when you think it most ought to. This performance is perfunctory: the horns aren’t on best form, and what we basically get is a decent reading rehearsal. Frankly the work deserves no better. Good sound, but stick to Segerstam on BIS.
