Is there anyone out there who would own up to preferring Schumann's revision of (what has become known as) his 4th Symphony?  Although Brahms thought the original version the better of the two, I believe that up until a few years ago we only ever heard the revised version. Radio 3 did play a 1950s Cantelli recording of the original a few weeks ago but in making that record Cantelli was apparently being -- original. Hearing again on Saturday the revised version and having grown up with Furtwangler's famous LP, for me the revision gains in grandeur and excitment, the the heavier scoring giving the work a dark seriousness not present in the first version. This is especially true of the transition to the last movement were half a dozen new notes screw up the tension and where I thought the brass of the Mahler revison, also played on Saturday, changed a meditation in to a fox hunt.

   Since it has become fashionable to decry the old idea that Schumann could not orchestrate why are we moving in the other direction with regard to his mature thoughts on the matter in the 4th Symphony, which were made while he was still of sound mind, or of no more unsound mind than was often the case earlier in his life?

To me it's not so much a matter of whether he was still of sound mind or not, more a reminder that they all composed for the circumstances at hand at least to some extent - my understanding was that in revising the orchestration (particularly in having what used to be wind lines doubled consistently by strings) he had taken some of the risk out, perhaps in response to performances where the winds couldn't quite handle the load.

Janacek's another case where a composer whose orchestration used to be often criticised made revisions which some nowadays reverse because the revisions were prompted by inadequate performances - such as the Glagolitic Mass originally with tutti quintuplets and septuplets, and with big passages for massed timpani...

Well, the new finale wasn't Beethoven's idea, of course, and I would submit that there were clearly other things on Beethoven's mnind than the goal of a "balanced finale" when he wrote the Grosse Fuge in the first place.  The GF is gloriously over the top as it is, of course, but it is even more so in its original context, and I feel strongly that it ought to be heard that way.

I haven't been around much for a few days either. But a new computer now sits before me and it's running Mac and Windows at the same time. All very confusing.

It's often hard to know in such cases whether technical or musical reasons prompted revisions. In my case anyway I prefer the originals of both the Schumann 4th and the Beethoven op. 130 - I'm not at all a fan of the Große Fuge without the rest of the quartet in front of it. Not affecting it as far as I can tell unless I'm doing it convincingly enough to have fooled myself...