Updated
on
August 23, 2017 |
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| The various recordings point up the formidable
hurdles - of structural projection, of balance, even of simple
coordination - that Rott has posed for his interpreters in
the
symphony, its brilliance, color, and wealth of appealing
melody notwithstanding. Like many of his late-Romantic contemporaries,
he eschews strict sonata and tripartite forms, generating a
comparable musical and emotional fulfillment through more innovative
structures. But where most composers flank two simpler inner
movements with two elaborate outer ones, Rott confounds expectations
by making each movement longer than the preceding one, so a
keen sense of the symphony's overall design is necessary to
avoid imbalance. The Finale's block-by-block structure
itself poses singular difficulties: the interpreter must calibrate
tempo relationships carefully to make those seemingly unrelated
episodes coalesce; and the tutti half-cadence, if hammered
too
hard, can sound like a full close, making the remaining ten
minutes or so seem so much busy anticlimax! |
| Rott's feeling for sonority, not unexpectedly
for a talented student, is similarly inconsistent. He builds
climaxes with a Brucknerian patience beyond his years, methodically
accumulating orchestral voices in layers, scaling down the
sonority
with equal logic in turn. The lighter, more "open"
sonorities evince a marvelous feeling for color and texture.
But the tuttis are problematic, pitting midrange harmonies
in the brass against insufficiently reinforced
themes
in violins and upper woodwind. The results are rather dense
sonorities that neither balance nor record themselves - almost
every
recording
turns harsh in attempting to encompass the brass and the unusually
active tympani. Even passages which look clear enough on
the
page, like the chugging strings and horns heading into the Finale's
big half-cadence, prove hard to hold together, not just because
of the instruments' physical separation on stage, but also
because strings and horns simply "speak" so differently. |
| Conversely, it's good to hear conductors finding
such diverse solutions to the problems posed by a relatively
unknown score. Today's record collectors justifiably complain
that standard repertoire performances have become too much
alike, with little of the spontaneity or distinctive insight
that once marked interpreters as individuals. (I can't help
feeling that the prevalence and ready availability of the standards
on disc has predisposed interpreters to accept a narrowly defined, "acceptable" performance
template for them, to veer from which takes both courage and
imagination.) The conductors discussed here, having to construct
Rott interpretations more or less from scratch, achieve clearly
distinguishable results - results, perhaps, that more accurately
reflect their musicianship and technical skills than do their
readings of more familiar works. |
| Part 4 |
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back to Part 2
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