Robin Ticciati, Scottish Chamber Orchestra - Schumann: The Symphonies (2014) [Official Digital Download - 24bit/96kHz]

This is music that is very close to Robin Ticciati's heart; he describes Schumann as one of his favourite composers and has often spoken about how important poetry, colour and story are to Schumann's music. Symphony No. 1 'Spring', blazes and sparkles with joy, Symphony No. 2 finds its way carefully through to the safe haven of its final movement, the much-loved Symphony No. 3 ‘Rhenish' moves with huge ease and assurance to a resonant and joyful conclusion. Symphony No. 4 is radical in the way each movement attacks the start of the next movement with barely a pause, and in its minute-and-a-half-long, shimmering and horn-call-filled transition to the finale. Under Ticciati and the SCO it is magnificent, the radical, soaring, disturbing and exhilarating symphony Schumann intended.

The SCO's smaller forces bring a lightness of touch and a clarity to the counterpoint; under Ticciati they achieve a sense of movement that no previous recording has.

Composer: Robert Schumann
Conductor: Robin Ticciati
Orchestra/Ensemble: Scottish Chamber Orchestra

Reviews: Robin Ticciati’s Schumann cycle is the third complete set to appear in the last six months, following Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s version with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe for Deutsche Grammophon and Simon Rattle’s with the Berlin Philharmoniker on the orchestra’s own label. It’s also by a considerable margin the best of them, in fact the finest set on disc since David Zinman’s on Arte Nova a decade ago, and perhaps the most impressive thing that Ticciati has done on disc so far.

Every bar in these urgent performances with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra seems alive and full of interest. Ticciati uses an orchestra with 32 strings, almost exactly the same size as those used for the first performances, and while none of the climaxes is ever lacking in weight or grandeur – the opening of the Third Symphony, the Rhenish, has a terrific sweep to it – the textures are joyously buoyant. The conductor and his orchestra toured all four works in concert before recording them in the Perth Concert Hall, and in each symphony there is the sense of careful consideration and total absorption in the music so that not a detail of Schumann’s scoring goes missing. Everything flows with total naturalness, yet tiny contrapuntal phrases that are often hardly noticeable are allowed to make their points here without a trace of mannered emphasis.

Ticciati opts for the usual 1851 score of the D Minor Symphony rather than the original version of 10 years earlier that Rattle made a point of performing, and demonstrates conclusively that Schumann’s supposedly heavy-handed revisions to the score need seem nothing of the sort. Though one might question a few of his tempi – the trio of the Fourth’s scherzo is dangerously slow, for instance – such moments are rare; hearing these symphonies in such superbly played, convincingly Schumannesque performances is irresistible. It is clear from this set, and also from his Berlioz recordings with the SCO, that Ticciati has a real affinity with early romantic composers; some more Schumann and perhaps Mendelssohn too ought to follow.