Gramophone – September 2019

gramophone.co.uk GRAMOPHONE SEPTEMBER 2019 125

THE GRAMOPHONE COLLECTION

PHOTOGRAPHY:

BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

going tough and even remastering cannot

disguise uncharacteristically lacklustre

Decca sound. A 1959 radio broadcast from

Stuttgart (Hänssler), meanwhile, elicits far

more idiomatic playing for all the

monochrome sonics. Three years earlier,

Adrian Boult seems to have set down the

first integral Schumann cycle, recorded

over four days in August 1956 for Pye-Nixa

and the Second (11/57) likely the fastest

available at just over 33 minutes. If this were

Boult’s means of galvanising a distinctly

hard-pressed LPO, it certainly makes for

cohesion if little in the way of subtlety.

One version from this period that

stands as a notable marker is that by

Leonard Bernstein, here conducting the

Stadium Concerts Symphony Orchestra

Robert and Clara Schumann in 1847,

as depicted by the Austrian painter and

lithographer Eduard Kaiser (181972)