This first recording of Penthesilea for a very long while (first ever on CD) is all the more welcome for including all of Wolf's other music for orchestra without voices. The two symphonic movements date from his teens and the more striking of the two, the Scherzo, is in one respect more assured than the huge and tumultuous symphonic poem that preoccupied him throughout his mid-twenties. The Scherzo is both deftly scored (which one cannot always say of the denser pages of Penthesilea) and most ingeniously constructed. Its 'theme', barely a bar long, is incessantly repeated, but by generating subsidiary ideas as it goes along it genially retains one's interest for a surprising span. The Trio has a hint of a folksong to it (and more than a hint of Berlioz's Harold en Italie), and the Scherzo doesn't so much return as gradually invade the Trio, only to strike off in quite unexpected directions just when the music seems ready to set out for the coda and home. A delightful piece: it would make a first-class opening item for a concert. So, but for a concert of light music, would the so-called 'finale'. In fact an orchestrated piano piece from even earlier in Wolfs boyhood (he seems to have abandoned his initial plan to use it in his never-to-be-completed Symphony), it is really another scherzo: jovially engaging, but less accomplished than its companion.
What both have, however, is more than a pinch of Wolf in his Italian Serenade manner. Together with the astonishing String Quartet (the first big work to be completed after the Symphony was abandoned) they prompt all sorts of questions about how Wolf's career might have developed had his large-scale instrumental music not received such deeply wounding rebuffs. So does Penthesilea, of course, that wildly turbulent 'opera for orchestra'. It is over-scored, Wolf himself knew that, but there is firm construction beneath its teeming invention. It needs urgency but a steady hand from a conductor, rich colour but discreet clarification of balance. A few thick and noisy pages aside (and these are probably due to the problems of recording such a complex score at a concert, rather than in the studio) Barenboim succeeds admirably; the almost flamboyantly splendid brass playing is especially enjoyable. The Italian Serenade is charmingly done (the viola solo played with vocal lyricism by Ana Bela Chaves) and the two little pieces from Der Corregidor are pleasant make-weights. Well worth investigating.'