Reznicek’s Tanz-Symphonie
was premiered in Vienna in 1926
under the baton of Weingartner. Five
years later Erich Kleiber introduced
it to New York. And in between Dresden
hosted what the notes call a "staged
version" – which I assume means
ballet. The Dance Symphony – it’s actually
his Fifth Symphony - is really an intensive
four-movement fifty-minute suite and
hardly a symphony at all, which would
doubtless explain its resonance for
the stage. It takes in a Polonaise,
Czardas, a Ländler and finally
a big Tarantella. The Czardas is a kind
of emotive slow movement in symphonic
terms and the Ländler takes the
role of a Scherzo.
Reznicek was a friend
of Richard Strauss and admired by Mahler;
the two influences on him are, it has
to be said, audible – though it would
be wrong of me to overstress the Mahlerian
influence, which is slight. Straussian
string layering does launch the Polonaise
where we find touches of the circus
as well as considerable grandeur. The
Czardas inspires more equivocal writing.
The notes refer to it in ways that make
it sound like a mini violin concerto
– but it seems to me, in this performance
at least, to possess a rather curdled
introspection and a nagging unease that
lifts it out of the ordinary. True,
the solo violin is often to the fore
and it does embrace more jaunty clarinet-led
freedoms, but the Czardas proper really
only emerges late, after about 9:00.
It’s not an overt pastiche; it’s subtler
than that.
The Ländler is
an amusingly wry affair and the finale,
the longest movement, certainly pulls
out all the stops. The notes somewhat
optimistically allege Ives, Janáček
and Stravinsky alongside Strauss as
points of reference. One can see that
the helter skelter piling up of motifs
and the brusque tarantella intercutting
might suggest the former two but I think
that’s a retrospective judgement and
not reflected at all
in the writing, which is here far more
clement. The clarinet writing is distinctly
Dvořákian and there’s a rather
saucily academic fugal section as well,
that doesn’t, let me add, suggest Reger.
Donna Diana
was a much earlier work, dating from
1898 – an opera better known for its
overture; the whole thing was apparently
not restaged until 2003. The two excerpts
include a rather gruff Spanish ballet
tinged with Viennese suavity and a characteristic
Waltz. Reznicek had dance music in his
blood.
The performances are
attractively committed without being
especially distinguished. But for admirers
of the lighter Reznicek some of those
intimations in the Tanz-Symphonie might
come as an intriguing opening out of
experience.
Jonathan Woolf
Danube Philharmonic, Vienna/Manfred Mussauer
