"The Vienna Radio Symphony could not have been bettered in a reading that,(...), has Fabian Enders asa sympathetic and always idiomatic exponent."

Those who acquired the 2010 CPO set of Günter Raphael’s music will have noted the absence of his First Symphony, of which this firstrecording solves one question as surely as it raises others.

Written in 1926 and premiered that October in Leipzig by Wilhelm Furtwängler, this was the first of 11 symphonies Raphael composedover the next three decades, which led him to the deadpan observation of his first five symphonies each being written ‘twice over’.Moreover, he fashioned the inheritance from Bruckner into an idiom of, but not ahead of, his own time.

The first movement is purposefully launched yet a more yielding aspect is soon in evidence, its ideas contrasted enough inthemselves to maintain momentum across a discursive if never prolix sonata design which is rounded off by a cumulatively dramaticcoda. The ensuing two movements make an effective unity – a fantasia-like Adagio building gradually and resonantly towards itsexpressive apex, before this subsides into a Scherzo playful and ominous by turns. It remains for the finale to achieve overallcohesion, its introduction unfolding in a crescendo of activity that sets out motifs to be developed intensively over what follows. Ifthe succession of densely wrought passages with more plaintive episodes sometimes threatens to lose focus, then the adeptness bywhich Raphael brings about a powerful if never bathetic culmination is as impressively sustained as the ambivalent calm into whichthis music ultimately withdraws.

The Vienna Radio Symphony could not have been bettered in a reading that, while it might be marginally tauter, has Fabian Enders asa sympathetic and always idiomatic exponent. With its spacious sound and detailed (if oddly translated) annotations, one can onlyhope he will record if not an integral Raphael cycle, then at least those symphonies that the composer passed over.

Richard Whitehouse