Heinz Holliger began his survey of Schumann’s orchestral music three years ago with the First Symphony. He ends it now with a collection of the overtures, alongside the two-movement torso of the so-called Zwickau Symphony from 1833, which is all that remains intact of what would have been Schumann’s first orchestral work. Most of the overtures, however, belong to the final years of his life.
The earliest is taken from the opera Genoveva, completed in 1849; the overture to Scenes from Goethe’s Faust was the last part of the oratorio to be written, in 1853, a year after Schumann’s music to Byron’s dramatic poem Manfred, of which the overture is the most often heard part.
Those three, Manfred especially, have an established place in the 19th-century orchestral repertory, but the others here – the overtures to Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea, Schiller’s The Bride of Messina and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – are rarely performed.
Certainly, their musical quality is uneven. But as he showed in the previous disc in the series devoted to the smaller-scale concertante works, Holliger is adept at breathing life into Schumann’s orchestral writing even when, in the later works, the inspiration flags. He begins with a cracklingly tense account of the Manfred overture, invests the opening of Genoveva with brooding mystery, and even manages to make the quotation of the Marseillaise in Hermann and Dorothea seem perfectly natural. Anyone who has followed Holliger’s series won’t be disappointed by this final instalment.
