Carl Reinecke’s symphonies contain much strikingly dull music, and the Third (recently released on Chandos in better sound) is no exception. The finale, in which the composer attempts grandeur but manages only a sort of anal-retentive exercise in inhibition, contains some particularly hopeless passages that no amount of enthusiasm on the part of the interpreters can possibly minimize. Still, Heribert Beissel and his Frankfurt band do their best and offer a competent performance that’s good enough to make it evident that ultimate responsibility for this snooze-fest lies with the composer and not the interpreters.
There’s a strange rule in music stating that composers who are notoriously uninteresting when attempting “conventional” forms become quite resourceful when presented with a technical or formal problem the solutions to which can be stretched out over an entire composition. Think, for example, of some of Spohr’s more imaginative violin concertos, or the late works in cyclical form of César Franck as compared to his anonymous early pieces. Balancing a solo harp against the orchestra certainly counts as one such problem, and Reinecke’s concerto is wholly delightful, not least because he decided to combine the scherzo with the finale–and because the very nature of the medium ensures that he needn’t attempt anything in the way of grandiosity.
Elsie Bedleem plays with lively, liquid tone and the accompaniments are finely done, particularly the nicely light, breezy finale. One additional drawback: constricted, boxy recorded sound quite unusual in a recent digital production (less a problem in the concerto than in the symphony). In all, this is very much a mixed bag, but pickings are pretty slim in the Harp Concerto so for that reason you might want to consider this.
