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.
