Josef Bohuslav Foerster (1859-1951)
Symphony No.2 in F major, Op.29 (1892-1893)
Cyrano de Bergerac, Op.55 (1903)
Hradec Králové Philharmonic Orchestra/Marek Štilec
rec. 2024, Hradec Králové, Czechia
Orchestral Music Volume Four
Naxos 8.574654 [68]

Hradec Králové is a Czech city of about 95,000 people, some 100 km east of Prague. It is approximately three-quarters the size of my home city, yet the performance of its orchestra puts my city in the shade with regards to orchestral classical music. We have no orchestra, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, who used to give an annual series of concerts, no longer visits.

The Hradec Králové Philharmonic Orchestra perform exceptionally well on this disc, and are splendidly recorded. Clearly their concert hall has well-suited acoustic.

I noticed two earlier Naxos discs of Foerster’s music, featuring the fourth symphony (review ~ review) and the first symphony (review). The orchestral suite Cyrano de Bergerac has been issued by Supraphon in a performance from the mid-1970s by Václav Smetáček and the Czech Philharmonic. That recording sounds thin and shrill, and is not helped by a performance that drags its feet: 39 minutes in comparison with Marek Štilec’s 32 minutes.

This Cyrano de Bergerac is an engaging and at times exciting performance. It is sided by superbly recorded brass; the trombones in particular have a growling bite that sounds superb. The strings have a lovely warmth, and the whole orchestra plays to a great effect. This five-movement suite is a fine example of late-Romantic orchestral music, with good contrast and strong themes. Whilst this is not the last word in memorability, but the music is very good and bear repeated listening. Foerster’s orchestration is in the Central-European tradition that Smetana and Dvořák made such good use of, and he uses his skills with aplomb.

To be frank, I do not find the symphony to be in the same league. Maybe Foerster was inhibited by the strictures of composing in symphonic form, but my initial delight at the beautifully recorded horns (they are granted the warmly ruminative opening theme) faded somewhat as the work progressed. The horn theme, a delightful inspiration combined with a more plaintive woodwind theme in the development, shows Foerster’s orchestration to be delightfully warm, rich even. He evidently recognised this because he brings it  back two or three times in the movement, and raises it to a climax at the end of the work.

The Andante sostenuto second movement would be the place for a really good tune. Instead, we get a rather sombre principal theme, memorable enough to be recognisable on second or third hearings, but it is not presented in a manner powerful enough to make a strong impression. The Allegro third movement is nothing special, pleasant though it is, with an occasional tinkle on the triangle.

The symphony ends with an Allegro con brio that really does not  take us to a satisfying conclusion. In fact, the composer convinced me that it had ended with a brief climax after ten minutes of toing-and-froing nowhere in particular, only for it to start up again re-introducing the first-movement horn theme, this time in a brief full brass panoply. This does not feel a natural way to end the work – it is just tacked on. The symphony lacks a sense of direction and thrust, which makes the movements sound insufficiently differentiated.

If it were not such a fine, committed performance by all concerned, I doubt that I would return to the work. As it is, the coupling is so beguiling that the disk will doubtless find its way to my CD player again. Naxos are to be congratulated for finding such a fine orchestra and concert hall in which to record them, not to mention the conductor who plays his part in producing such a fine disc. I wonder how they would sound in a Mahler symphony, No.6, say?

Naxos have provided a single-sheet English-only insert. It nonetheless gives a detailed biography of Foerster, a guide to both works and information about the performers.

Jim Westhead

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