Raff: Symphony No. 7 "In den Alpen" & Jubel-Ouverture, Op. 103

Chronique

Released more than a decade after it was recorded, one has to wonder what held up the issue of Werner Andreas Albert and the Philharmonia Hungarica's recording of Joachim Raff's Symphony No. 7 in B flat major, "In den Alpen," Op. 201, and Jubelouverture, Op. 103. It can't be the quality of the sound. CPO's recording is as clear and round and warm as its recordings have always been. It can't be the quality of the performance. The Philharmonia Hungarica has improved immeasurably in the decades since it formed and is now firmly in ranks of the better provincial European orchestras and Werner Andreas Albert is as he has always been, a doughty and durable champion of repertoire that almost nobody has ever heard before. It must be the repertoire. Joachim Raff was the fellow who orchestrated some of Liszt's earlier symphonic poems and he may have been the greatest Swiss composer of the nineteenth century, but his Symphony No. 7, like the six that proceeded it and the four that followed it, is deadly dull and terminally tedious. In Raff's music, everything is where it's supposed to be and doing what it's supposed to do, but none of it is surprising and very little of it interesting. In his Symphony No. 7, Raff fashions a patriotic symphonic travelogue through the Alps nearly as exciting as a slide show of somebody else's summer vacation. In his Jubelouverture, Raff takes the English patriotic hymn God Save the King and transforms it into balderdash, bombast, and ballyhoo. This is only for listeners who have to hear every symphony ever written in the nineteenth century.
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