When in 1865 Cesar Cui hailed an apprentice work by the young Rimsky-Korsakov as ''the first Russian symphony'', he managed by implication to take a swipe at the founding father of the St Petersburg Conservatory, so derided by the free-school 'mighty handful' of which Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov were members. By then, Anton Rubinstein had already written three symphonies; though, listening to Ocean, one takes Cui's point—there is nothing nationalist in modo Russico here at all. No matter: while the water music of Mendelssohn's Fair Melusine or his Third Symphony is never far from sight, Rubinstein's themes in that vein are rarely less than charming, and the first of them provides fertile ground for development. If only Igor Golovchin cared to phrase a little more lovingly. Can this really be the ex-USSR Symphony Orchestra, so recently proving itself the best of all the Russian orchestras under Svetlanov at the Colmar Festival? Those incisive trumpets might give the game away; but the string playing is tentative and dimly lit in the Moscow Conservatoire recording—the promising cello theme in the third movement passes for nothing—and the woodwind are undistinguished.
In the finale, a robust if slightly academic celebration certainly not within striking distance of the sea, Golovchin does at least build up a powerful head of steam; but by then, we're already breathing sighs of relief that he opted for the reasonably compact original version of 1852. Rubinstein added two new movements in 1863 and a seventh in 1880. Maybe a creative shaper of Jarvi's standing might care to restore them, but here their place is taken—thankfully, under the circumstances—by the ballet music from the opera Feramors. The first two numbers reveal Rubinstein's accomplishment in more delicate orchestration—closer to Gounod than to the lower standards of Russian-ballet hacks Minkus and Drigo—while the ''Wedding Procession'' anticipates Rimsky-Korsakov's glittering operatic ceremonials; the timpani cross-rhythms in the last four bars certainly come as a surprise coda to a display of good mid-nineteenth-century manners.'