Karl Goldmark creeps into the more expansive music reference works for two reasons: his brief teaching – in Vienna – of Sibelius; and his 1877 Rustic Wedding Symphony, a five-section, 45-minute divertissement which Sir Thomas Beecham enjoyed reviving. Other than that, he seems almost entirely forgotten (though a handful of violinists, including Joshua Bell and the late Nathan Milstein, have recorded his concerto).
Most people will have been totally unaware that Goldmark even attempted a Second (i.e. non-Rustic-Wedding) Symphony, but he did, and this is actually its second CD version. The first – a Marco Polo release two decades old – was unavailable for comparative purposes, which is perhaps as well, since the golden-toned new disc surely surpasses it. Singapore can now boast a really effective local orchestra, better than some Australian bands and worthy to rank with all save the topmost American ensembles. Touches of string portamento give a pleasantly old-fashioned atmosphere to various passages. Latter-day Beckmessers might dock points for some slightly crude trombone sounds and for the cornet-like first trumpet that dominates the symphony’s third movement; the rest of us will not care a toss about such venial flaws. While in stylistic terms the work owes something to Schumann’s exuberance (and shares with Schumann’s Rhenish the key of E Flat), Goldmark the orchestrator is in the highest 19th-century league, the league of Berlioz, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov.
If you don’t yet know the Rustic Wedding, you should. Really, “symphony” is a wild misnomer here. We have, instead, a series of ingratiating tone-poems, splendidly tuneful, and again scored with a master’s hand. Several big conducting names have brought Rustic Wedding to the recording studio by now – Leonard Bernstein and André Previn, to name two – but in such exalted company the obscure Lan Shui proves something of a revelation, and can take an honourable place. BIS’s recorded balance is, as always with this company, admirable. Now, any chance of his once-renowned opera The Queen of Sheba? It could be fun!
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