Gál Symphony No. 2 and Schumann Symphony No. 4 – Woods

There is a particular ache that attaches to music written by exiles, and Hans Gál’s Symphony No. 2 in F, op. 53, carries it. Gál wrote this symphony in 1942–43, in Edinburgh, having already lost his post at the Mainz Conservatory to the Nazis, having already spent time interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien despite being the alien the enemy was trying to kill. None of that appears in the score as anecdote. All of it appears in the score as atmosphere.

Kenneth Woods conducts as though he has lived with this piece for years, which by now he probably has — this is not his first outing with Gál, and the Orchestra of the Swan plays with the settled confidence of a band that trusts its maestro’s advocacy. The opening string theme is genuinely unsettling, a slow unfurling that never quite resolves into comfort before the music blossoms into something warmer, more mellifluous, almost pulsing. Critics reaching for comparison keep landing on Bruckner, and I understand why — there’s a processional quality, a sense of vast spaces being addressed — but Gál compresses where Bruckner expands. No mountains dance here. Everything is pared back, tightly drawn, as if the composer distrusted grandiosity on principle, or perhaps just didn’t have the emotional latitude for it anymore.

A musical language formed in the long shadow of the 19th century, played out in a century that had stopped believing in shadows that long. Gál sits somewhere between Brahms’s architecture and something cooler, more astringent, that he never fully commits to — call it modernism observed through a rain-streaked window rather than modernism embraced. The Allegro energico injects rhythmic bite and a wider dynamic range, and here and there — particularly in passages of dancerly momentum — you catch a whiff of Mahler, though Gál’s Mahler-echoes come filtered, muted, robbed of their theatrical excess. The slow movement is the real discovery. That opening cello line, dark and unaccompanied at first, has an ache to it that goes beyond good part-writing; it sounds like memory. The playing here is hushed, intimate, almost chamber-scaled — you can hear individual desks of strings breathing together rather than a wall of tone, and the engineering, clean, front-forward, not overly reverberant, lets every inner voice register.

Is it a great symphony? I’m not sure “great” is the right yardstick. It’s an honest one, and a beautifully crafted one, and it deserves to be heard far more than it has been. Woods and his players make the strongest possible case.

The Schumann pairing is harder to assess dispassionately, if only because we have been here so many times before, with so many towering predecessors — Furtwängler’s incandescent, wayward account, Szell’s steel-edged clarity, more recently period-minded readings from Herreweghe and Gardiner that strip away a century of accumulated varnish. Woods falls somewhere in between old-school warmth and newer transparency, and mostly it works. The Orchestra of the Swan is a chamber-scaled band, and that scale suits Schumann’s often-maligned orchestration better than the plush string sections of a big-city orchestra. Textures that can sound muddy in larger hands come through here with real definition, inner voices audible, the famous “thickness” problem largely dissolved by sheer transparency of numbers.

The opening Ziemlich langsam has weight without sludge; the transition into the main Allegro has genuine urgency, strings articulating with bite rather than blur. The slow movement’s oboe-and-cello duet is tenderly shaped, unforced. Where I want just slightly more is in the finale. Woods keeps things disciplined, well-drilled, but Schumann at his best in this symphony wants a touch of derangement, a sense that the cyclic thematic return is not just structurally satisfying but somehow inevitable, fated. That extra ten percent of abandon — Furtwängler had it in spades, chaos and all — isn’t quite here. Still, this is a thoroughly respectable, often illuminating Schumann Fourth, and it never embarrasses itself alongside its starrier rivals.

The disc’s real justification, though, is the Gál. Woods is turning out to be exactly the champion this music needs. Recommended, with particular enthusiasm for listeners who don’t yet know this symphony.