Symphony No 4 - Variations On A Hussar's Song, Malmo SO/Vassily Sinaisky, Naxos 8.572118 ***

It's over 50 years since a Gramophone review of Franz Schmidt's Fourth Symphony mused on the "unexportability" of the Austrian composer's music in the context of Janacek, Nielsen and Vaughan Williams. Janacek and Nielsen have triumphed, but Schmidt, like Williams, still seems to struggle on the international concert scene. He flourishes on CD however, where the latest survey of his four symphonies, by Vassily Sinaisky, is now complete. Schmidt wrote his Fourth Symphony in 1933 in memory of his daughter, who had died in childbirth. It's the best-known of his symphonies, monothematically generated out of the long, opening trumpet call, and is here paired with the altogether jollier Variations on a Hussar's Song. Sinaisky's approach seems just that bit too smoothly serene, and yields to the similarly coupled Franz Welser-Möst version available cheaply from EMI.

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