Conducted by Edgar Seipenbusch with the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra.
I. Sostenuto - 00:00
II. Scherzo - 14:22
III. Adagio - 23:27
IV. Moderato - 31:56
In 1897, the year in which his opera Sarema was first performed, Zemlinsky completed his Second Symphony, a work that was to attract a favourable reaction from the public. The symphony opens with a movement that has its own forthright grandeur, with a suggestion of Wagner. There follows a dramatic scherzo and a romantically contrasted trio. The slow movement, marked Adagio, has about it something of the poignancy of Mahler, happily resolved in conclusion. It is followed by a final movement that interrupts this mood of serenity with something more ominous, before the final resolution of conflict.
In 1896 Bruckner had died, and the death of Brahms came in the following year. Among the younger generation of composers, Richard Strauss, who was to outlive them all, had completed his series of symphonic poems, while Hugo Wolf, near to his final madness, had quarrelled with Mahler over the merits of Rubinstein's opera The Demon, and unilaterally declared himself director of the Vienna Opera. This was the Vienna of which Zemlinsky was a part, and in which the Symphony in B flat major was written.
