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Exuberant: Conductor Vladimir JurowskiPA Wire / Geoff Caddick Review at a glance
The LPO under Vladimir Jurowski last night performed an extraordinary hour-long Autumn Symphony not heard anywhere for 80 years until a Graz outing in 2005 and never before heard in this country.
The composer? The Austrian Joseph Marx (1882–1964), some of whose Lieder are occasionally performed by more enterprising singers, but whose orchestral works are rarities.
Marx was antipathetic to the Second Viennese School, but his Autumn Symphony recalls the Gurrelieder of Schoenberg, not least in its massive forces (quadruple woodwind, six horns, 10 percussionists).
The swooning harmonies of Scriabin are in evidence too, and the chromatically enriched style of Zemlinsky. Most egregious of all are the borrowings from his friend Schreker’s opera Die Gezeichneten.
It is by no means a conventional symphony, at least in structural terms, being far too rhapsodic. But it is certainly autumnal in its glowing russet hues and delicious late Romanticism.
To be honest, it’s a bit of a self-indulgent wallow. The second-movement waltz seems interminable, while the finale’s Dionysian wine harvest celebration, with demented xylophone, turns into an orgy that also goes on far too long.
There’s a good deal of wonderful music there too, and all credit to Jurowski for exhuming this forgotten score and delivering it with such élan. The programme also featured Julia Fischer, an eloquent soloist in Chausson’s Poème for violin and orchestra, and in another neglected score: the Autumn Poem by Respighi.