Buckets of composers have written symphonies over the years. Some of them were quite good at it. Some of them weren’t. For every Beethoven there were dozens of Ferdinand Ries-es, each scribbling away at threadbare glosses on the vastly greater inspiration and skill of their betters. The judgment of posterity has heaped up quite a pile of symphonic corpses: Raff, Ries, Volkmann, Draeske, guys nobody plays anymore. Even relative biggies like Louis Spohr are trotted out only rarely.
But that isn’t to say that all of the composers outside the Golden Circle (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Sibelius, Elgar, Shostakovich) aren’t worth a collective tinker’s damn. There’s some dandy stuff out there by some dandy composers. But who wants to slough through all that third-rate treacle, in the hopes of finding a nugget of nourishment?
You don’t have to because orchestra junkies such as myself have done it for you. I have actually listened to the complete symphonies of Ferdinand Ries, of Felix Draeske, of Raff and Rubinstein and Gade and Volkmann. And I say nuts to all of them. Boring, predictable, some of them oversugared and overspiced (Rubinstein), others weirdly unsatisfying even if technically correct (Ries), others just kinda bleeech (Draeske.)
But there are others that I’ve taken to quite fondly, composers off the beaten path who put together symphonies well worth the expense in money and time.
Mozart Camargo Guarnieri (Brazil, 20th century)
Camargo Guarnieri wrote the symphonies that Heitor Villa-Lobos might have created had Villa-Lobos been a fussbudget and technical perfectionist instead of the freewheeling, exuberant soul that he was. True, Villa-Lobos gifted us with twelve symphonies, including the sprawling "Amerinda" No. 10, all worth hearing and enjoyable as all get-out. But stream-of-consciousness isn’t necessarily the best strategy for holding together a large abstract composition like a symphony, and while the Villa-Lobos symphonies offer glorious moments, they just don’t hold together all that well.
But the Camargo Guarnieri symphonies do hold together, and how. There are six in all, recorded beautifully by John Neschling conducting the Sao Paulo Symphony, on BIS. They’re all worth getting to know, although for my part I have a special fondness for symphony No. 3—a beautifully-constructed work that combines an evocative nationalism with a strong sense of symphonic logic.
Hugo Alfvén (Sweden, late 19th and 20th century)
I suppose you could describe him as a Swedish Sibelius, if that isn’t too confusing given that Sibelius himself was of largely Swedish ancestry. Alfvén has a reputation for writing sugary nationalist fare, such as Midsommarvaka with its bouncy polka rhythms. But he has a lot more to offer than that. I can’t recommend his Second Symphony in D Major, Op. 11 highly enough—dramatic, beautifully structured, and ending with a neo-Bachian Prelude and Fugue that comes across as downright Busoni-ish.
His use of the orchestra is on par with the best of the era, and his ability to sustain a long rhetorical form such as sonata-allegro puts him in securely in the ranks of the most polished masters. Oh, his work isn’t necessarily all that original. He doesn’t explore the range of moods of an Elgar, or stretch the boundaries of form like Sibelius. But he was a doggone fine composer, and his symphonies are jim-dandy and peachy-keen.
The inexhaustible Neeme Järvi has left us fine performances, meticulously recorded by Swedish label BIS, with that radiant northern jewel of an orchestra, the Stockholm Philharmonic.
Bohuslav Martinů (Bohemia/Czech Republic, 20th century)
Maybe Martinů’s prolificity has worked against him in posterity’s judgment; like Milhaud, he churned it out like a pasta machine in high gear. Also like Milhaud, he settled in America as a teacher—in his case, at the Mannes College of Music in New York—where some of his students achieved notable levels of fame, including songwriter Burt Bacharach and that astonishingly fertile Seattle composer Alan Hovhaness.
There are six Martinů symphonies, the first five of which were products of the WWII years (1942–1946), with a sixth dating a bit later in 1953. Of those, Symphony No. 1 of 1942 may be the most popular (and deservedly so; it’s a stunner), but all six are worth exploring.
There is no mistaking Martinů’s idiom. His orchestral sound is unique, characterized by high winds, harp, and especially piano, against surging and often dense string writing. He was particularly fond of syncopated folk-like melodies set with octatonic modes, sustained washes of tone, and extended rhapsodic passages. As the symphonies progressed he experimented with form to a certain extent, but generally the classic four-movement structure was his mainstay, with his experiments typically serving to combine several of the traditional movements into one.
Martinů’s symphonies have been recorded much more frequently than either Guarnieri’s or Alfvén’s. Two sets in particular stand out for me—Jiri Bélohlavek’s with the Czech Philharmonic on Chandos, and Bryden Thomson with the Royal Scottish National, also on Chandos. The Thomson renditions run a bit overly aggressive here and there, and the recorded sound is a bit on the strident side. But neither objection holds for the Bélohlavek/Czech renditions, which impress me as downright ideal recordings of these marvelous works.
