Schumann: Carnaval; Symphony No. 2

The Ravel settings inject a Gallic clarity into the "Carnaval" fragments, but one would be hard-pressed to identify Ravel as the orchestrator. Leo Delibes would likely have been my logical guess as to the identity of the "mystery" orchestrator, had the question of identification been put to me. Regardless, a pleasant and interesting nine minutes of offbeat Schumann.

Despite the rarity of the Ravel settings, Theodor W. Adorno's small-orchestra settings of Schumann's "Kinderjahr" (Op. 68) is the real treasure of this album. Adorno (1903-1969), far more famous as philosopher/culture critic than as composer, studied under Alban Berg, with a small catalog of largely atonal works resulting. (If Anton von Webern, with his own small catalog of works, deservedly earned the sobriquet of "pocket composer," a similar sobriquet for Adorno would likely be "watch-pocket composer.")

While "Delibes for Ravel" might be a logical guess for the "Carnaval" fragments, I'm not sure that anyone, coming upon these Adorno settings of the "Kinderjahr" pieces could hazard a correct guess as to their origin without a clue or two provided. (I know that I certainly couldn't!) The chamber orchestrations are felicitous, totally transparent and absolutely fascinating. The writer of the booklet notes (Horst A. Scholz) offers a possible explication of how it might have been that Adorno saw fit to prepare these orchestrations in 1941, while Adorno was in exile in America. Like so many such explications of anything and everything that Adorno did in his lifetime, Scholz's description is, in and of itself, "Adorno-esque." But it simply doesn't matter in the end; the music is highly enjoyable and totally unexpected.

The performance of Schumann's 2nd Symphony is quite good; just not up to the level of other recordings readily available. In particular, I "imprinted" on Leonard Bernstein's recordings, with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, of all four Schumann symphonies, using Schumann's original orchestrations, more than three decades ago (then on Columbia LPs, now on remastered Sony CDs). There was a freshness to those performances that just happened to catch me at a susceptible time.

While Bernstein later went on to record the four-symphony traversal a second time, with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra on DGG (and largely to better effect in the other three symphonies), his remarkably intense interpretation of the third-movement Adagio espressivo on that earlier Columbia/Sony recording remains to this day a touchstone for me for its proto-Mahlerian emotional angst. Perhaps not to all tastes, but certainly to mine.

This album, then, is largely for the Schumann compleatist. The Ravel and Adorno orchestrations are true rarities; as far as I know, not available on any other coupling. And the Adorno settings of the six "Kinderjahr" pieces are simply exquisite.