The Compact Collection

Mahler: Symphony in E major; Pastorales Vorspiel/Hans Rott

If, 12 or so years ago, you had asked me to name Mahler's most original early symphony I would have answered unhesitatingly, "the Third". That was until I chanced upon the remarkable E major Symphony that 20-year-old Hans Rott composed in the late 1870s. Rott's proto-Mahlerian masterwork was discovered in the archives of the Austrian National Library by the musicologist Paul Banks. When Hyperion issued the symphony's premiere recording in 1989, some commentators called for an instant re-write of musical history. They were surely not exaggerating, and CPO's new recording with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies encourages a further appraisal.

Rott was an unstable genius who had been snubbed by Brahms but who had the stuff of Mahlerian inspiration coursing through his veins. He died in an Austrian asylum at the age of 26, having earlier attempted suicide.

Like any young composer, he freely expressed key influences through his own work, principally Wagner (in the first movement of the symphony) and Brahms (in the finale, an unmistakable reflection on the finale of Brahms's First). But the expansive vistas, the echoing brass motifs, rustic ländler and the overall slant of his themes all point in the one direction. And so do many of the themes. That direction is Gustav Mahler, who once said of Rott that he was "the founder of the new symphony as I understand it".

Beam up 5'09" into the second movement and straight away you're transported into the first movement of Mahler's Third. At 7'36" you're ferried to the finale of the same work, an effect that's compounded at 7'55" with the entrance of distant brass. It's uncanny! The opening of Rott's third movement suggests the second movement of Mahler's First, then, 4'05" into the finale, echoing horns again recall the Third Symphony's first movement. And that's not all – the fugato writing in Mahler Five's scherzo makes a showing at 9'43" into Rott's third movement; and from 1'53" into the finale, who could mistake the Seventh in embryo, specifically the gathering of winds that occur near the beginning of Mahler's first "Nachtmusik"?

This is not "naming and shaming", nor is it in any way a slur on Mahler's magnificent symphonies. In any case, Rott's musical personality is quite different to Mahler's: rough-hewn, innocent and entirely lacking any suggestion of kitsch. Mahler re-deployed Rott's elemental gestures onto a larger canvas, and treated them to infinitely more sophisticated development. And while it's virtually impossible to encounter Rott without hearing Mahler alongside, listen often enough and the power of this warm and life-affirming work strikes home on its own terms. The slow movement, is a marvel of spontaneous invention. Davies's performance is the best we've had so far, and there's a fill-up in the earlier and less memorable Pastorales Vorspiel, with its blatant echoes of the Siegfried Idyll and distant premonitions of Gurrelieder. One wonders where else Hans Rott might have taken us had he lived long enough to undertake his journey.

Hans Rott: Symphony in E major; Pastorales Vorspiel (CPO 999 854-2)