Jacques Mercier, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie - Théodore Gouvy: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2 (2011)

Posted By: ArlegZ

Date: Jan. 22, 2024

Louis Théodore Gouvy (1819–98) was born on the border between two cultures, French and German. He grew up in a French-speaking family living in an Alsatian village in the Saare, which at the time of his birth was under Prussian control. Not until he was 32 was he able to attain French citizenship.
As a child, he showed no particular interest in or talent for music. But arriving in Paris in 1836 to study law, he met Adolphe Adam, an acquaintanceship that altered Gouvy’s course. Music studies in Paris at the conservatory and then in Berlin followed. The training he received in Germany predisposed Gouvy to instrumental music, a bias that did not stand him in good stead back in Paris, where the opera-crazed French took little note of orchestral and chamber music. Recognition and financial reward were hard to come by for a composer of symphonies and string quartets in a culture that valued opera above all else. So Gouvy spent the last 25 or so years of his life in Germany, where his music was more appreciated. Still, he remained relatively unknown to the general public during his lifetime and virtually disappeared off the radar after his death, though other composers familiar with Gouvy’s work—Brahms, Joachim, and Reinecke, for example—held him in high regard.
Gouvy wrote nine symphonies, the first five of which were composed over the course of a dozen years between 1845 and 1857. Even in the earliest of them, which we have here, there is already a consummate mastery of form, motivic development, and orchestration, not to mention a keen ear for melodic and harmonic invention. A recurrent striding motive in the first movement of the E?-Major Symphony strongly resembles a similar thematic element that runs through Schumann’s Fourth Symphony. It’s impossible to say whether it’s an echo or an anticipation, for Schumann’s original version of the D-Minor Symphony dates from 1841, which would have come before Gouvy’s opus, while the revised version dates from 1851, which would have come after Gouvy’s work. In either case, there is no way to know if Gouvy heard Schumann’s earlier version of the score. What can be said with a degree of certainty is that Gouvy’s First Symphony is very much in the style of the Schumann-period German Romantics who played so important a role in his musical training and personal ethos.
Here is a composer well worth exploring for those who appreciate really well-made and beautiful orchestral and chamber music in a mid 19th-century, post-Mendelssohn, pre-Brahms, hovering-around-Schumann cast. And if you prefer starting at the beginning rather than somewhere in the middle—cpo has previously recorded Gouvy’s Third, Fifth, and Sixth symphonies—the current release offering the First and Second is the perfect place to start. Performances and recording are everything one could possibly desire.
–Jerry Dubins

Performer:
Deutsche Radio Philharmonie
Jacques Mercier, conductor

Tracklist:
Louis Théodore Gouvy (1819-1898)
Symphony No. 1 in E flat major, Op. 9
01. Allegro maestoso
02. Scherzo. Allegro
03. Andante. Con moto
04. Finale. Allegro con brio
Symphony No. 2 in F major, Op. 12
05. Introduction. Allegro
06. Scherzo. Allegro assai
07. Andante con moto
08. Finale. Allegro con fuoco

EAC LOG

Exact Audio Copy V1.6 from 23. October 2020

EAC extraction logfile from 21. January 2024, 19:15

Jacques Mercier, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie / Gouvy: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2

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