Given that Dvořák’s nine symphonies seem to receive recordings in direct proportion to their allocated number, it’s good to see a label offering a full cycle with up-to-date versions of the earlier symphonies. So far, SWR Music has given us warmly romantic accounts of Nos 1, 3, 4 and 5, courtesy of the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie under Karel Mark Chichon, and an outstandingly finessed No. 2 from the same orchestra under Pietari Inkinen (best known to Aussie audiences as the conductor of Opera Australia’s two recent Ring Cycles).
Here they arrive at No 6, perhaps the first of the composer’s symphonies to truly inhabit that idiomatic Bohemian territory that would lead to the increasingly masterly Nos 7, 8 and 9. Composed in the late summer of 1880, it exudes the scents and occasionally folk-tinged spices of the...
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