It’s quite a history, Hans Gál’s. Born near Vienna in 1890; moved to Germany and became, for a time, a very well-known and successful composer; fled back to Vienna with the rise of Hitler (Gál was of Jewish descent), and then fled that city for Britain at the Anschluss, living and teaching there until his death in 1987. Meanwhile, his music swelled the ranks of the unperformed.
Britain’s Hans Gál Society seems determined to do something about that. Gál’s music has been appearing on CD in recent years. First there was the Edinburgh Quartet’s recording of his complete string quartets, for the Meridian label; next came an ongoing series of orchestral, chamber, and piano music, on Avie. The violinist Thomas Zehetmair, who is also the music director of the Gateshead, England–based Northern Sinfonia, has now recorded two of Gál’s symphonies with that orchestra, pairing each with a Schubert symphony. Avie AV2224 contains, astonishingly, the first recording of Gál’s 1927 Symphony No. 1. I say “astonishingly” because it’s absurd that music this interesting should be unknown.
If the Gál is the main item of interest here, its companion piece, which comes first on the disc, is an unexpected delight. Schubert’s “little” C Major Symphony, D. 589, tends to be typecast as the cute and perky one among that composer’s symphonies. Cute and perky it certainly is — it is repeatedly on the verge of mutating into a Rossini overture — but there’s considerable toughness, as well: a strong vein of early Beethoven.
Listen To The Music
Schubert: Symphony No. 6, III. Scherzo - PrestoGál: Symphony No. 1, I. Moderato
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It’s the varied characters and the drama of their juxtaposition that Zehetmair and his forces are unusually adept at bringing out. Nothing could be more limpidly innocent than the winds’ statement of the theme in the first movement’s Allegro, or suaver than the Rossiniesque second theme, but the darker parts of the development section and — still more — the coda are pure Beethoven. Everything that isn’t impossibly light and frothy bristles with compact energy. I don’t know how big a band this is (surely there are at least twice as many players as the 20 pictured in the booklet photograph), but it has that small-orchestra-giving-its-all sound that makes “period” performances of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven often more exhilarating than those by comfortably upholstered “modern” symphony orchestras.
The Andante’s opening is wistful and delicate, yet there’s drama to come; the Scherzo bounds like an eager puppy, while the decidedly odd Trio, with its tolling winds and wandering violins, sounds as strange as it ought. And the finale is pure adventure — a ridiculously winsome little tune sets off on its own and wanders through all sorts of fantastic landscapes, vividly characterized here.
The theme of this Schubert/Gál series is that the two composers are “kindred spirits,” but you would not necessarily think so immediately on hearing the end of the Schubert and then the beginning of Hans Gál’s First Symphony. The ruminative opening phrases suggest, rather, Brahms (the quietness and the key bring the Second Symphony to mind), though the harmonic language is more complex and ambiguous, and the melodic style freer and longer-limbed. It’s a difficult style to describe: something like Elgar, something like Franz Schmidt.
The predominant note of the lyrical passages is a yearning quality, full of surging, upward gestures. But everything in that opening reappears in other guises later on, adopting a stern or wry or even menacing edge, before the opening manner returns, blissfully, and the movement sinks down toward its hushed end.
The second-movement Burlesque is a pert, colorful jest of a piece, studded with insolent winds and brass and replete with unexpected turns (the ending’s a delight). The Elegy that follows it is deeply felt, full once again of that Elgarian vein of ceaseless melody. It’s often sparsely scored, with one or two solo instruments carrying the melodic skein over a scant, subtle accompaniment. The finale is a Rondo, exceedingly various in material and ingeniously put together. It, too, has a brilliant and amusing ending.
I can’t imagine the work’s being performed much better than this; Zehetmair and his band obviously know it backward and forward, and they play the heck out of it. You’d think it was a repertoire standard, not a first recording. I would wager that it won’t be the last.