Gerard Schwarz is one of those conductors who, for whatever reason, just isn’t fashionable now. His sizeable discography suggests that perhaps he was at one time - or at least that the CD recording boom of the 1990s was kind to him.
His recordings have been a fascination of mine for a while, not least because of his preference for antiphonal violins at a time when hardly anyone else did it. He is mainly associated with two major orchestras with whom he held music director posts with: the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.
A few years ago I stumbled across his Brahms symphony cycle, recorded with the Seattle Symphony between 2007 and 2010. Until recently it hasn’t been widely available and I bought it directly from the Seattle Symphony website. It was one of those symphony cycles I found myself listening to from start to finish - and there aren’t too many of those. Barenboim’s Schumann cycle is another such example for me (sadly deleted from the catalogue at the moment).
What marks out this Brahms cycle from the countless others out there is quite hard to describe. There’s nothing flashy: no interpretative quirks or spotlighting in the recording. Schwarz lets this astonishing music speak for itself. As a conductor, achieving this is not a passive act of simply letting the orchestra play the music with no interpretative direction - it’s far more difficult than that. Orchestral musicians each (and collectively) come with their own ideas about how this music should be performed, either from their own or others’ performing traditions. Persuading them to leave these at the door and look at the works afresh requires diplomacy, will and skill on the part of the conductor.
What we hear in these recordings is a fairly natural concert hall soundstage, albeit a touch over-resonant and lacking in the mid-frequency range (by which I mean violas). There is a Central European feel to the sound, with a generous cushion of strings founded on a firm bass and wind instruments not overly prominent. Tempi are generally broad, relentlessly so at times with Schwarz refusing to put his foot on the accelerator (or brake) where many others are tempted to do so for effect. This only intensifies the music, the counterpoint in particular.
The contrabassoon unexpectedly emerges in the sound picture where so often you don’t hear it in the first, third and fourth symphonies. You really don’t hear it in most recordings, which makes me wonder why the poor players were even booked! It’s not crude or overbalanced - just there. Trombones the same.
All the repeats are there, even sounding natural in the first symphony. The final wonder for me: that triumphant chorale passage in the finale of the first symphony. In tempo! And all the more thrilling for that. (It’s how I do it, too).
Fortunately, these recordings are now more widely available in a Naxos box set ‘The Gerard Schwarz Collection’. So go get them - though you’re probably best streaming them if you don’t want to invest megabucks. Just don’t tell me they’re boring.
PS - check out some of his other recordings as well, while you’re at it. The Dvorak 6 is also a wonder.
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