It’s good to see this thoroughly professional Martinu cycle being offered at three discs for the price of two, as it contains some very good performances, particularly of the even-numbered works. Symphony No. 6 gets as fine a performance as you will find anywhere, with a particularly effective finale. Elsewhere, despite excellent credentials in Czech music, the Bamberg Symphony and Neeme Järvi find some of this music heavy going. Mind you, there’s nothing seriously wrong; it’s just that Järvi’s casual approach, wherein he pegs the climaxes but lets the stuff in between basically take care of itself, doesn’t work very well in music that is less about the final destination than the road traveled.
The lifeblood of Martinu’s music is his constant recourse to syncopated rhythm; the melodies should float over the bar lines with athletic grace. In the odd-numbered symphonies, particularly Nos. 3 and 5, Järvi and his players fail to grasp this: for example, the coda of the Fifth Symphony’s finale needs a certain lightness to its “Beethoven Seventh” rhythmic scheme, and Järvi’s attempt to whip up excitement by making a big accelerando into the final bars comes as too little, too late given the heavy tread that precedes the closing moments. The finale of the Third Symphony reveals a similar problem. Sure, the last climax crashes in impressively, but the softly haunting chorale for solo string quartet against that weirdly chromatic flute counterpoint, which is the clinching moment (emotionally speaking) and which ignites the ensuing climax, simply drags along slackly. Nor do the strings always sound comfortable with some of the trickier rhythms in the First Symphony’s opening movement.
When these performances were originally issued in 1987 and ’88, there was much less competition in this music and, particularly given the excellent sonics, they made a stronger impression. Now, with fine complete cycles on Chandos (Bryden Thomson’s finest achievement on disc) and Naxos, and a new one on the way from Supraphon which by rights ought to be very fine, these versions are still worth listening to but only as a supplementary view. It’s a little sad to have to be less than enthusiastic about a thoroughly professional job that rises to genuine excellence now and then, but consumers today have the luxury of choice, and unless you collect these symphonies on principle there’s no need to settle for second best.
