GRAMOPHONE Review: Copland: Quiet City / Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 ‘From The New World’ / Ives: ‘Holidays’ Symphony – Solistes Européens Luxembourg/König

It’s a neat idea framing Dvorak’s ubiquitous ‘New World’ with two miniatures of authentic Americana – one rural, one urban – from perhaps her most famous sons: Ives and Copland. But that’s about as far as my enthusiasm for this disc goes, I’m afraid.

Misgivings quickly surfaced during the first of the New World offerings as Ives’ postcard from New Fairfield on the occasion of George Washington’s Birthday came sharply into focus. The impressionistic winter chill sits icily enough at the start but once we repair to the Barn Dance, the Jew’s Harp twanging out a rhythm of sorts for the awkward footwork, it’s as if conductor Christoph König is hell bent on finding order in the chaos, of tidying up the jamboree so that some semblance of decorum remains. It’s all so very clean. The old sentimental melodies drift by at the close but even the final nod to ‘Goodnight Ladies’ lacks a certain irony.

It is, though, the perfect segue into the opening page of the Dvorak symphony. There is a fireside cosiness about that, a sense of the music being scaled down. And what follows is pristine to a fault – neat and tidy, refined and polite, and quite bloodless. The slow movement only becomes emotionally engaging when solo strings feature in the closing bars. Suddenly we have an inkling of where the reading lives. For the rest, a feeling of objectivity, of detachment, prevails.

It’s hard writing about performances whose shortcomings are easy to recognise but hard to define – and perhaps that’s it: there is no defining character about König’s reading. That big tremolando moment at the close of the scherzo, for instance, should open up a sudden and surprising vista before us. But it’s just a tremolando. The scale of the moment is diminished. And surging (as we should but don’t here) into the finale – hardly my idea of con fuoco – we are never really and truly on the edge of our seats. Sorry, but it just isn’t exciting.

Copland’s Quiet City throws up a subliminal ‘connection’ with the cor anglais-led slow movement of the Dvorak but if your volume is set satisfactorily for the Dvorak the close-up focusing of the Copland makes everything sound too loud – there isn’t that inherent mysticism and ear-pricking Hopperesque magic. Lovely trumpet playing from the Solistes Européens Luxembourg principal (uncredited) gently invoking the composer’s jazzer brother, but it’s a flash of personality that is sadly lacking elsewhere.