Reviewing Richard Wetz’s Second Symphony (9/00), Andrew Achenbach was intrigued by its style (‘a hybrid of Bruckner and Liszt’) but had his doubts about its intrinsic worth and staying power. I am a good deal more convinced by the Third, apart perhaps from its rather rambling recapitulatory finale, but this 20-year-old recording suggests a reason or two why Wetz’s reputation did not long survive his death in 1935. The conservatism of his idiom is one of them, of course: this is a desperately old-fashioned symphony for anyone to have written in 1922. There is also a curiously crabbed quality to Wetz’s writing at times. As a young man he enrolled under several teachers, but stayed with none of them for more than a few months. There may be a legacy of this in his at times dense counterpoint and his obsessive use of ostinato.
There is a third factor, however, which might have affected this performance. The author of the booklet (and the recording’s producer) says that Wetz was careless in the preparation of his scores and performing material; he adds that this performance uses Wetz’s manuscript, but that a ‘critically revised’ score has since been prepared. Is that the reason why some of the climaxes seem so congested, some of the orchestral textures so heavy and far from homogeneous (though the close but reverberant acoustic doesn’t help)?
Despite all that there is real nobility to some of Wetz’s pages (the Brucknerian second subject of the first movement and its splendid conclusion) and fine melodic invention. It is somehow characteristic of him that at its first appearance the theme of his slow movement soon curdles into dense motivic working: you only realise how beautiful it is when it returns. The scherzo is odd: a bony, deliberately almost vulgar waltz with a trio that isn’t so much a contrast as a contradiction. I am still not convinced by the finale, in which Wetz seems to be trying to prove his axiom that the unity of a symphony could be tested by playing all of its themes in combination. The performance, I think, must be regarded as a provisional one, but it adequately introduces an oddly original composer