Joachim Raff remains one of classical music’s great embarrassments — not because his music is embarrassing, but because we have embarrassed ourselves by ignoring it for so long. In his own lifetime he was counted among the most considerable composers in the German-speaking world, admired by Liszt and Brahms both, taught by neither, beholden to nobody in particular. Then came the 20th century, and the sorting machine of musical history did what it always does: it kept the difficult and discarded the agreeable.
What we lose by that bargain is audible in every bar of his Symphony No. 2 in C major.
This is not a symphony that strains toward the infinite. It doesn’t announce itself with the chest-beating urgency of late Brahms or the metaphysical restlessness of Bruckner, Raff’s rough contemporary. Instead it does something rarer and, honestly, harder — it sustains a lyrical argument across four movements without once going slack. The opening Allegro has the quality of a confident man in a good mood: themes arrive fully formed, harmonically sure-footed, orchestrated with a naturalness that recalls Schumann at his most unguarded. There’s a moment in the development where the winds carry a fragment of the main subject through a brief modal shadow — nothing earthshaking, just quietly radiant — and Järvi’s orchestra catches it exactly, without making a fuss. That restraint is the whole point.
Neeme Järvi knows this repertoire the way an old bookseller knows a favorite shelf. His tempos breathe. The Orchestre de la Suisse Romande — an ensemble shaped by decades of Ansermet’s long shadow, then by Armin Jordan’s warmer hand — plays with the kind of stylistic fluency that younger orchestras can’t manufacture through goodwill alone. The strings have that slight Continental edge in the lower voices, and the woodwinds blend as if they’ve been playing this music their whole lives, even though they almost certainly haven’t.
The three Shakespeare preludes from 1879 are another matter — and a more surprising one. Raff wrote them late in his career, when he was director of the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt and might have been forgiven for coasting. He didn’t coast. The prelude to The Tempest opens with a kind of churning harmonic instability that anticipates the sea-music of later composers without sounding like a period piece, and the Macbeth prelude drives through its dark C minor with a directness that is almost uncomfortable. There is no wallowing here, no theatrical excess — Raff understood, as Shakespeare himself understood, that the most commanding moments arrive without announcement.
The Romeo and Juliet prelude, the shortest of the three, is also perhaps the most skillful. In D major, and deliberately lyrical where the others are turbulent, it resolves into something close to serenity — a choice that could easily feel naive but instead feels earned.
How does this recording stand against what’s already out there? The Bamberg set under Hans Stadlmair has its admirers, and rightly so; it remains a serious achievement. The Marco Polo cycle, recorded across multiple sessions with Czech and Slovak orchestras under Urs Schneider, was valuable for its mere existence — Schneider believed in this music when almost nobody else did — but the sound quality was variable enough to test your patience. The Chandos SACD is not, I should be honest, flawless either; there is an occasional woolliness in the lower frequencies, a slight compression in loud tutti passages, that suggests the recording chain was not quite equal to the acoustic. It matters less in the Shakespeare preludes than in the symphony’s bigger moments.
But Järvi matters more. He brings to this music what it most needs — not advocacy, exactly, but belief. The difference is everything.
Raff deserves to be heard. This is the album to hear him in.
