★★★★
One of the most vivid portraits of Gustav Mahler was written by a fellow-Czech who, like Mahler, was a wage-slave in 1890s Hamburg. Mahler was paid to conduct 120 nights at the opera without having any say in the artistic direction. Josef Bohuslav Foerster, whose wife Berta Lauterer was Mahler’s star soprano, found work as a music critic while composing unplayed orchestral scores. Mahler found friends to pay for a premiere, his second symphony in Berlin. Foerster’s was unperformed. When Mahler became head of the Vienna Opera in 1897 he sent for Berta to join his stellar cast and helped Foerster find newspaper work.
Foerster’s second symphony is exactly contemporaneous with Mahler’s and prompted by similar motives. Foerster’s sister Marie had died, as had Mahler’s sister Poldi. Both were wrestling (as their conversations reveal) with the purpose of life on earth. But where Mahler went ballistic in his Resurrection Symphony with chorus, soloists, off-stage bands and a massive great bell, Foerster clung to the modest dynamics of a Dvorak symphony and produced a work of emotional restraint in which the slow movement is the most sombre and effective.
This rare recording is beautifully delivered by the philharmonic orchestra of Hradec Kralovve and conductor Marek Stilec. Unfailingly courteous, the F major symphony presents Foerster as a skilled composer, lacking only the edge of genius or a talent for plagiarism. There is no Mahler in this music.
The album’s companion piece, incidental music for a theatrical comedy, was Foerster’s most popular work. He outlived Mahler, Berta and the world they inhabited, dying under Communism in 1951.
