Hans Gal: The Four Symphonies, Orchestra of the Swan/Kenneth Woods (Avie)
Following the two BBC SSO Discovering Music concerts at Glasgow's City Halls, here is a very welcome double disc set gathering together recordings of the music of Viennese Edinburgh resident Hans Gal made by the Stratford-based Orchestra of the Swan at the start of December each year from 2010 to 2013. Woods, a cellist who has also recorded Gal's chamber music for Avie, achieves a remarkable consistency of ensemble sound over that period, so it is the development of the work over a career of compulsive composing that we hear, from 1927 to 1975. In some ways that was a journey into conservatism, so Gal's distance from the fashions of the 20th century in the UK probably did not help secure performances for his music, but we live now in an era of broader tastes, and there is no denying the quality of his writing. Some elements are consistent throughout, like his love for wind instruments, with clarinet, flute and - particularly - oboe often given the best of his tunes, but there is a world of difference between the variety of styles in Symphony No.1 and the perfect arc of three-movement Third, which was, probably significantly, the first to be recorded.
Keith Bruce
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