Christian Sinding (1856-1941)
Symphony No.1 in D minor, Op.21 (1894)
Symphony No.2 in D major, Op.83 (1907)
Symphony No.3 in F major, Op.121 (1919)
Symphony No.4 in E flat major, Op.129 (1936)
Norrköping Symphony Orchestra/Karl-Heinz Steffens
rec. 2023/24, De Geerhallen, Norrköping
Capriccio C5540 [2 CDs: 150]
Sinding is more than just the composer of the evergreen piano piece ‘Rustle of Spring’ but he is quite hard to get to grips with stylistically. It was his early chamber music that gathered some modest approval but at the age of thirty he broadened into writing large-scale music. His symphonic cycle occupied him for over four decades.
The First Symphony had a long birth – it was begun in 1886 in Leipzig, subject to revisions and only completed in its final version in 1894. It’s a substantial four-movement work lasting 40-minutes in this performance and shows a confident handling of sweeping themes, cast in sonata form, and revealing a penchant for a certain bardic strength. The slow movement is sensitively shaped – dynamics here register well, Karl-Heinz Steffens charting adroitly the expressive curvature of the music which has a certain formal melancholy that grows in amplitude. Sinding is not wholly without a sense of humour as the pomposo elements of the Scherzo’s trio indicate and he has recourse to Tchaikovskian coloration and drama in a finale that has triumphal pretensions, not all of them fully realised.
In 1907 he completed the Second Symphony, somewhat more modest in size and in three movements. This is a misfire of a work with a lot of huffing and puffing, desperately searching for an elusively memorable tune, and coming up instead with Wagnerian bombast. In the central movement Mastersingers is on his mind and whilst there is some dappled witing for the winds and some diaphanous strings, by the finale he is back on Wagnerian autopilot, with a surfeit of generic material.
The Third is the most impressive of the symphonic quartet. Composed in 1919 one might suspect that it’s a war symphony but it opens instead, with romantic ardour, well developed, which is graced by horn calls and an air of turbulence. The Andante is warmly textured, well orchestrated and finely paced. Sinding thins textures and varies the density of his sound sensitively. The Scherzo is packed with incident, buttressed by a firm use of lower brass, droll winds and a rather Alpine sense of folk music. For the finale he has recourse to his standby, Mastersingers, but only briefly before he is off for an energising, confident and genteelly amusing stroll.
His final symphony is subtitled ‘Frost and Spring’, is cast in seven movements and was premiered just after Sinding’s 80th birthday in 1936. The work is called a ‘rhapsody for orchestra’ and it does function rhapsodically, albeit it’s almost defiantly sectional in construction. Its sonorous opening section is soon belied by the pellucid and deft colours in the second panel and thereafter the symphony moves through expressive writing with great vigour and exuberance. The compressed slow movement has a fine tune which is gently embroidered and the finale breaks out with Spring’s ferment, an exuberant welcoming of verdancy. Still, there are some whimsical balances, not least Sinding’s use of lower brass.
CPO has recorded all the symphonies, the first two with the NDR conducted by Thomas Dausgaard (review) and the final two with David Porcelijn (review). Before that, the first two were also recorded by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra under Ari Rasilainen (review), who also recorded the last two. They were available on Finlandia Records.
There are attractive notes and a good recorded sound. The Norrköping Symphony plays well and the only blip is that Capriccio has transposed someone else’s birth and death dates in its documentation though Jens Laurson has things right in his booklet notes.
Jonathan Woolf
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