Frederic Hymen Cowen: Symphony no. 3 in C Minor, “Scandinavian”; The Butterfly’s Ball; Indian Rhapsody
Czechoslovak State Philharmonic, Košice; Adrian Leaper, conductor.
Marco Polo 8.220440. Recorded at the House of Arts, Košice. Compact disc.
A Victorian Survivor Worth Reclaiming
It’s one of those dispiriting ironies that bedevil British musical life: here’s Frederic Hymen Cowen—knighted maestro, fêted composer, a fixture at the Hallé and Liverpool Philharmonic—and it takes a Czech orchestra on a budget label to get his symphonies into the catalog. The British orchestras he once led? Silent. Our major labels? Looking elsewhere. Meanwhile, Adrian Leaper and the Czechoslovak State Philharmonic have quietly done the work we should have done ourselves.
The centerpiece here is the Symphony no. 3 in C Minor, the so-called Scandinavian, from 1880, and it’s immediately clear why this piece established Cowen’s reputation. The opening movement wastes no time—clarinets and bassoons stake out the territory with a theme that’s interrupted (Beethoven hovering nearby) by arresting string chords. Then comes a flowing melody that shows real craft in its development. Not groundbreaking, perhaps, but genuinely appealing. The orchestration has bite.
That second movement, though—here’s where Cowen earns his keep. Offstage horns evoke the Nordic landscape with considerable atmosphere, and there’s a secondary theme around 5:22 into the track that manages to sound both Mahlerian and distinctly its own thing. (Yes, I know the chronology doesn’t quite work. But the resemblance is there.) The refined string writing underneath that theme suggests Cowen actually looked at Scandinavian vistas rather than simply imagining them from his London study.
The "scherzo" shows real inventive flair. Those violas and cellos maintain a repetitive motif—technically demanding, not as easy as it sounds—while a bright, chirpy theme floats above. It’s clever writing, the kind that reveals a composer who understood what orchestral musicians could actually do and how to make them sound good doing it.
Then we hit the "finale", and things get complicated. The movement feels Arabian rather than Scandinavian—did Cowen confuse his exotic locales?—and there’s a crudeness to the main motif that’s hard to overlook. Whether that’s compositional miscalculation or simply the recording balance going awry (more on that shortly) remains unclear. The mood swings are violent, the structure somewhat disjointed until the recapitulation arrives to pull things together. It works, finally, but it’s the symphony’s weakest link.
The Butterfly’s Ball, an overture from 1901, is lighter fare—frothy, delicate, making deft use of a large orchestra to suggest ephemeral things. There are moments that hint at Der Rosenkavalier (again, chronologically impossible, but there it is). It’s dedicated to the Queen’s Hall Orchestra, that ensemble Robert Newman managed and Henry Wood conducted at those pioneering Proms. Pleasant without being substantial.
The Indian Rhapsody raises questions. Did Cowen actually travel to India? Because this sounds more like a Chinese market scene than anything from the subcontinent—the colors are distinctly Oriental, the themes more Far Eastern than South Asian. Still, the orchestral textures are well managed, the piece cohesive. Perhaps we should simply accept it as Victorian exoticism and move on.
Now, about that recording. The string sections are too closely miked, the acoustics dry in a way that’s unusual for Marco Polo. It’s reminiscent of those early postwar recordings where everything sounds slightly airless, slightly boxy. The House of Arts in Košice is a decent hall—I’ve heard fine recordings from there—but you wouldn’t know it from this engineering. Leaper gets distinguished playing from the orchestra (those tricky viola passages in the "scherzo" are handled with real security), but the sonic presentation undermines the music’s impact. Some artificial reverb in a reissue wouldn’t go amiss.
The larger question remains: why has Cowen disappeared? Eduard Hanslick, no easy mark, found “good schooling, a lively sense of tone painting and much skill in orchestration” in his work. The Scandinavian Symphony was popular at home and abroad. Yet British musical culture has essentially written him out of the story, dismissed him as a Victorian relic superseded by Elgar and what came after.
That’s too simple. Yes, Cowen lacks Elgar’s visionary intensity, Stanford’s contrapuntal rigor. But he had genuine gifts—melodic facility, orchestral color, structural competence. This disc makes a solid case for rehabilitation, even if the recorded sound doesn’t do the music full justice. We owe it to our own musical heritage to do better than leaving Cowen to Central European orchestras working on shoestring budgets.
The Marco Polo series deserves credit for the effort. But imagine what these works might sound like with, say, the Hallé in their home hall, proper engineering, a conductor who’d lived with the scores for months rather than learning them for a budget-release session. That’s the disc Cowen actually deserves—and that British musical institutions continue to deny him.
