LISTENING to any new recording of Schumann’s Second Symphony between concerts of the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall recently might not have been the best idea. The work has long been a Cleveland specialty, and in the Christoph von Dohnanyi years the orchestra often played the Scherzo as an encore: an incomparably balletic scamper.

No surprise that the Orchestra of the Swan, based in the Civic Hall of Stratford-upon-Avon, England, is no Cleveland Orchestra or anything close. But supreme orchestral polish and virtuosity are beside the point here, which seems to be to situate Hans Gál in music history.

Kenneth Woods and the orchestra, having made a CD of Gál’s music for Avie, are now pairing his four symphonies with those of a 19th-century soul mate, Robert Schumann. They started with the two Thirds.
Gál, revered during his lifetime as a 20th-century composer, teacher and writer (a wonderful biography of Brahms, among many other works), is no mere curiosity. But a curiosity he surely is, a throwback who wrote old-fashioned symphonies (this Fourth in 1974) and concertos of consummate craft in a mostly consonant, mellifluous style seemingly little touched by the great tragedies of the 20th century or his personal troubles.

Born near Vienna in 1890, he established a substantial career in Germany but was driven by the Nazis back to Austria and then to England, only to be interned there for a time. Several members of his family, similarly tormented, killed themselves. Gál died in 1987.

His Fourth Symphony, also called Sinfonia Concertante, gives prominent solos to flute, clarinet, violin and cello. The spirit is perhaps closest to Neo-Classicism, though, even deploying a smallish orchestra, Gál seems to be striving for some of the lushness of his beloved Romantics.

Mr. Woods and the orchestra do a fine job of revealing the qualities of this peculiar master.