Schmidt: Variations on a Hussar's Song CD review – adventurous but variable

Outside his native Austria, most of Franz Schimdt’s music remains in the twilight zone, its stigma of having found approval with the Nazis in the 1930s impossible to erase. Naxos has released a cycle of the symphonies, the fourth of which just about clings to the periphery of the repertory, along with Schmidt’s gigantic oratorio The Book with Seven Seals. This Capriccio collection offers three more candidates for rehabilitation. The piano-and-orchestra Fantasia from 1899 anticipates material Schmidt used in his opera Notre Dame five years later, while the Variations on a Hussar’s Song and the orchestral Chaconne in D minor date from 1931.

Performances under Alexander Rumpf are more than decent, but the music is distinctly variable, with the Fantasia, in which Jasminka Stančul is the soloist, as the most routinely late Romantic. The Variations are skilful and sometimes distinctly adventurous harmonically, if you can stomach the unremitting back-slapping cheerfulness of the theme. It’s the big-boned Chaconne, almost half an hour long, that is the most compelling piece here, conjuring an unexpectedly massive music structure out of what seems, at first, a rather unprepossessing theme.