Dvořák: Symphonies No. 7, 8, 9; In Nature’s Realm; Carnival Overture; Othello Overture – Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/ Semyon Bychkov – Pentatone PTC 5187 216 (2 CDs = 75:41; 82:01) [Distr. by Naxos] ****:
By 1885, composer Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904) had attained an astonishingly fluent mastery of orchestral technique, and his last three symphonies and the 1891-1894 overture-narrative cycle, Nature, Life, and Love exhibit a dramatic fusion of lyric and expressive power. As an example of the evolution of symphonic form after Beethoven, Dvořák’s 1885 Seventh Symphony (formerly catalogued as No. 2) represents the most concise application of traditional sonata-form principles after the symphonies of Robert Schumann and contemporaneous with Johannes Brahms, perhaps even more melodically generous.
Recorded 27 September and 13 October 2023, these performances by Semyon Bychkov (b. 1952) confront several potent predecessors, including, for the 7th Symphony, the driven 1980 reading by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. The recorded tradition featuring the CSO includes excellent readings by Vaclav Talich (recorded in the 1930s) and those of Vaclav Neumann. Bychkov’s approach proves consistently more leisurely, emphasizing the Czech Philharmonic’s wonderful, interior colors in string and woodwind blends. While this perspective may add a bucolic dimension to the opening Allegro moderato, it rather diminishes the elastic menace the score evinces at its most urgent moments. Bychkov prefers the luxuriant hues in Dvořák, playing down the vehemence that draws its inspiration in the composer’s long study of the Beethoven canon. When Bychkov does cut the rope for his brass and timpani, the sonic impact from the Dvořák Hall of the Radolfinum, Prague has been well captured by Recording Producer Holger Urbach.
The same, predominantly melodic approach invests the second movement, Poco adagio, with the glossy surface of seamless lyricism, with the French horn and CSO winds in elegant harmony. Those who seek the tragic muse in the first two and last movements in this epic work – doubtless aware that Dvořák had suffered personal losses in his mother’s death and the mental collapse of his national idol Bedrich Smetana, consigned to an asylum – will find Bychkov almost willful in his subduing of the sinister undercurrents in the music, preferring the surface gloss. Not that this consummate sheen lacks persuasive power, but the emotional depth feels undercut.
The subsequent third movement furiant, essentially a Slavonic Dance marked Scherzo: Vivace – Poco meno mosso, robustly articulates the rhythmic bite and cross-rhythms in Dvořák’s expressive, national color arsenal. The last chords invest their impetus into the opening, dark tenor of the last movement Allegro, but the composer himself has decided to alleviate the pathos with a resolution in the tonic major. For a pretty, emotionally restrained Dvořák Seventh, this performance bears comparison with the Eugene Ormandy renditions of otherwise dire works he may have found disruptive.
The 1889 Dvořák Symphony No. 8 in F Major conforms much more agreeably with the Bychkov treatment, more in the Bruno Walter tradition of exuberant optimism, only periodically interrupted by mortal storms, as in moments of the E-flat Major Adagio. The declamatory passages ring with appropriate ardor, but the haunted and tempestuous aspects of Beethoven and Wagner remain subdued, and eventually emergent as a hymn of praise close in spirit to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, finishing on a soft, descending scale pattern’s coalescence with the heraldic opening motif.
What likely stands out comes in the form of the slow tempo for the third movement Allegretto grazioso, here even more dreamlike and hazy than the 1954 Vaclav Talich performance. The Trio’s off-beat rhythm and sensuous palette receive loving care, as if Dvořák were competing with Tchaikovsky for rarified sentimentality. The fanfare that opens the last movement Allegro ma non troppo leads directly into a warm string melody, vigorously paced by Bychkov. The martial element soon erupts with the muscular energy and clean trumpet work we would have liked in the D Minor Symphony. Dvořák’s whistling interior filigree, especially the flute part, dazzles as the CPO brass advances the sonata structure. The slow, extended, bucolic meditation will make one last, exuberant leap into the emotive heights, the coda (with its multi-tongued trumpet) a vivacious assertion of spirit.
In 1891 Dvořák embarked on a consciously programmatic series of color overtures, Nature, Life, and Love, with the last of the triptych directly responsive to Shakespeare’s tragedy, Othello. The first of the trinity, published in 1894 under the title, In Nature’s Realm, came to the attention of this writer via the classic 1941 recording by Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony. Bychkov, too, fully realizes the notion of waterfowls’ rising from hazy waters to ascend to the poet Hopkins’ God’s grandeur. Rather through-composed, the paean to the loveliness of Nature evolves in an economical sonata form, a blissful, pantheistic declaration in diverse orchestral colors. The Carnival Overture has held sway with me ever since Antal Dorati made its jubilant points with the London Symphony Orchestra. The middle section, Andante con moto, contrasts a meditation to the outside, festive content, featuring an alluring violin lyric answered by woodwinds, strings and harp.
In the Tchaikovsky mode, the Othello Overture compresses the tragedy of the doomed Moor into a quarter-hour’s duration, with an introductory “jealousy” motif and pungent allusions to Othello’s inflamed rage against the supposed betrayal; smothering his beloved Desdemona amid her protestations of innocence; lamenting his “past service” to the state of Venice; and his inevitable suicide, a victim of Iago’s “tissue of lies.” Iago himself has no musical representation that I can identify. The initial theme from In Nature’s Realm has become bitterly emblematic of Nature’s cruel neutrality to the moral universe.
Lastly, we have Bychkov’s caressed interpretation of the ubiquitous New World Symphony of 1893, a reading thoroughly dependable and dynamically sensitive. Bohemian musical impulses become cross-fertilized by visions of Longfellow’s Hiawatha, while the music proceeds in seamless sonata form in the first movement, Adagio – Allegro molto, with repeat, augmented by the limpid, crystalline sonority of the Czech Philharmonic. But for all the intrinsic beauty and athletically aural resonance of his performance, Bychkov cannot compete with the fiercely tragic visions Ferenc Fricsay rendered both in his Berlin Philharmonic and RIAS Symphony realizations. Admittedly, Bychkov’s galloping coda merits repeated listening.
The slow movement, Largo, delivers perfect ambiance for the opening wind solo, its surrounding tissue intimate as any chamber music ensemble. Bychkov favors drawing out cadential passages in long held notes, thus the renewed melodic line achieves a great intensity. The sonority does not ripen into molasses
Lastly, we have Bychkov’s caressed interpretation of the ubiquitous New World Symphony of 1893, a reading thoroughly dependable and dynamically sensitive. Bohemian musical impulses become cross-fertilized by visions of Longfellow’s Hiawatha, while the music proceeds in seamless sonata form in the first movement, Adagio – Allegro molto, with repeat, augmented by the limpid, crystalline sonority of the Czech Philharmonic. But for all the intrinsic beauty and athletically aural resonance of his performance, Bychkov cannot compete with the fiercely tragic visions Ferenc Fricsay rendered both in his Berlin Philharmonic and RIAS Symphony realizations. Admittedly, Bychkov’s galloping coda merits repeated listening.
The slow movement, Largo, delivers perfect ambiance for the opening wind solo, its surrounding tissue intimate as any chamber music ensemble. Bychkov favors drawing out cadential passages in long held notes, thus the renewed melodic line achieves a great intensity. The sonority does not ripen into molasses, and so maintains a taut, driven line. The vivid, robust scherzo, Allegro vivace, beats out a pentatonic tattoo – not far from the second movement of the Beethoven Ninth – generously divided among the instruments, with sounding brass and timpani. The Trio enchants us with a swaying, if muscular, waltz, before the original energies of the Mid-West Kickapoo tribe assume prominence once more. The fervent punctuations for the last movement, Allegro con fuoco, command a martial impulse that will later yield to pedal points that establish a grand cello melody that Bychkov milks for its inherent value. Allusions to prior movements appear, ever more nostalgic, in Dvořák’s patented “and so my children” ethos. Almost a dirge, the final pages declaim a moment both epic and bitter, the simultaneous vision of American promise and cruel reality.
—Gary Lemco
Semyon Conducts Dvořák
Symphony No. 7 in D Minor, Op. 70;
Symphony No. 8 in G Major, Op. 88;
Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95 “From the New World”;
In Nature’s Realm, Op. 91;
Carnival, Concert Overture, Op. 92;
Othello, Concert Overture, Op. 93
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra
