Schumann: Symphonies Nos 2 & 4 (arr. Mahler); Genoveva Overture, LGO/ Chailly

Schumann has regularly been accused of being an indifferent orchestrator, though if he did not handle the orchestra with the virtuoso flair of contemporaries such as Weber, Mendelssohn and Berlioz, his scores were by no means incompetent. But when Mahler came to conduct the four Schumann symphonies in Vienna and later New York, in the last decade of his life, he made his own edition of the scores, carefully grading the orchestration to clarify the sound and the structure of works that he admired greatly. The majority of his amendments are tweaks to the dynamic markings; relatively few involve significant changes, and even those that do remain strictly within the bounds of the early Romantic world. And as Riccardo Chailly's superb performances make clear in the Second and Fourth Symphonies, these are not recompositions by Mahler, but the music of one great composer edited by another; what you hear are Schumann's symphonies with their outlines sharpened and their content left intact.