Tchaikovsky: Symphonies Nos. 4 & 5

Album review

Best known for defending the music of his day with opinionated talent, Austrian conductor Hans Rosbaud was also a great Mozartian, who brightened the Aix-en-Provence Festival which would remain forever linked to his name. His work began in the 1920s in Mainz, and then in Frankfurt, where he would defend Schönberg and Bartók, two composers who were falling foul of the political regime which was slowly taking hold in Germany. During the war he performed in Strasbourg and was then named as director of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra in 1945 by the American occupation authorities. In 1954, he directed the first performance of Schönberg's Moses and Aaron, which would prove memorable.
His work with the SWR Orchestra left a lasting mark on the period, in particular around contemporary music festivals in Donaueschingen in the 1950s. We find him here directing Tchaikovsky's Symphonies n° 4 and n° 5. His vision, stripped of all pathos, gets right to the point by underscoring the existential, dramatic and implacable nature of the Russian artist's later, semi-autobiographical symphonies, as his pessimism deepened with age. There is very little here of the complacency which is too often imputed to this bitter, severe music, which is dominated by that sentimental extroversion which is a part of the Russian soul. © François Hudry/Qobuz