Raff: Symphony No 5; Overtures; Abends

Joachim Raff's Fifth Symphony, Lenore, after a macabre 18th-century ballad about a dead soldier returning to lead his beloved to his grave, was written in 1872 and remained popular early i nto the 20th century. The music is anything but grotesque, not least because Raff treats the first three movements as a mostly joyful prequel before getting to the story of the ballad itself. Neeme Järvi's account is not just brisk but often breezy, taking the composer's metronome markings as cue and emphasizing the undoubted influence of Mendelssohn on Raff's style,. Bernard Herrmann's altogether slower, pioneering 1970 account is more programmatically persuasive. Järvi handles the extras, the rhapsody Abends, and four overtures well. url.ie/f1f2