Weingartner Symphony No. 7 – Letonja

Somewhere in the afterlife, one imagines, Felix Weingartner is still adjusting tempos nobody asked him to adjust — a fussy, patrician ghost hovering over the podium, correcting Beethoven for the thousandth time. He was, after all, one of the great conductors of his era, a man whose recordings of the nine symphonies still repay listening, whose edition of the scores shaped interpretation practice for decades. That he also composed, prolifically and with total conviction, is one of those historical footnotes that occasionally gets dusted off and handed a hearing it may or may not have earned.

This CPO release closes out Marko Letonja’s traversal of the Weingartner symphonies, a project that has crept along since the early 2000s — the earlier discs came out between 2003 and 2006, and then, silence, until now. The gap makes sense once you hear what they were dealing with. The Symphony No. 7 in C major, op. 88, completed in the year of the composer’s death, calls for four vocal soloists and chorus, was left unpublished, and had to be prepared from manuscript for this recording. That’s not a small undertaking for an orchestra and a label, however dedicated to obscurity.

And obscurity is the right word. This is a work that lived, until now, only as a rumor.

The Beethoven inheritance is inescapable — how could it not be, coming from a man who spent a lifetime inside those nine symphonies, editing them, arguing with them, all but living inside their bar lines? The choral writing in the second and fourth movements gestures, inevitably, toward the Ninth, though without ever risking Beethoven’s cosmic ambition. Weingartner’s harmonic language stays comfortably, almost stubbornly late-Romantic — he was no modernist, had no interest in being one, and by 1936 when he presumably began sketching this piece, composers half his age were already deep into a very different century. There’s a wonderful stodginess to some of the orchestration, brass writing that thickens rather than cuts, part-writing in the strings that recalls Brahms filtered through decades of respectable Central European kapellmeister tradition.

Does it work? In places, yes — surprisingly so. The slow movement has genuine breadth, a long-limbed melodic unfolding that suggests a composer who, whatever his limitations as an innovator, knew exactly how a phrase should breathe. Elsewhere the piece sags under its own formality, four-square rhythms and predictable cadential gestures that never quite catch fire.

The performance itself is the disc’s real virtue. Letonja and the Basel Symphony Orchestra play as though they believe every note, which counts for a great deal in repertoire like this — nothing kills a rediscovery faster than an orchestra hedging its bets. The strings have a warm, slightly veiled sonority that suits the music’s autumnal cast; ensemble in the choral passages, handled by the Czech Philharmonic Chorus Brno, is disciplined without sounding scrubbed clean of character. Of the soloists, soprano Maya Boog floats her top with real security, and baritone Christopher Bolduc brings an unforced gravity to his lines that never tips into portentousness. Franziska Gottwald’s contralto is rich if occasionally covered by the orchestral texture, and tenor Rolf Romei sings cleanly, if without much individuality of tone. Babette Mondry’s organ contribution registers mostly as reinforcement — a wash of low-end weight rather than a real solo voice, which seems to be exactly what the score wants.

There’s no competing disc to weigh this against, which simplifies the critic’s job and complicates the collector’s. You take this version or you take nothing.

I won’t pretend this symphony belongs on the shelf beside the Beethoven it so clearly reveres, or even beside the better products of Weingartner’s own considerable back catalog as a director. But as a document — of a musical culture that was already, by the late 1930s, an anachronism even to itself — it has real value. Letonja and his forces have done Weingartner proud, and CPO, characteristically, has done the field of neglected German romanticism yet another service. Not an essential disc. But a genuinely interesting one, and interesting counts for something.