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Some people may know Sylvio Lazzari from an EMI disc of French symphonic poems conducted by Michel Plasson, which featured his stirring Effet de nuit, but I guess the name is unfamiliar to most. Sylvio Lazzari (1857-1944), originally Josef Forunat Silvester and originally Austro-Italian (from Tyrol), belongs to the generation after Cesar Franck and together with d'Indy, Duparc and Chausson. That should give you a clue to his style, ardently late romantic and Franck-inspired though also with clear influences from impressionism, especially in the late Tableaux Maritimes.
The Tableaux Maritimes is the stronger of the two works here; atmospheric, finely scored and colorful though only intermittently memorable (the stirring last half of the first movement for instance). The symphony, on the other hand, appears to try to fill out Franck's cyclic form, inflexibly, with impressionistically inspired harmonies in a firmly late-romantic idiom. It doesn't quite work, and several appealing ideas soon turn into slightly dull and lackluster and aimless exercises.
I am not completely convinced that Adriano makes the best possible case for the symphony either, failing to let the music flow as freely as it perhaps could and rather choosing to bind it up by a strict observation of the form - but it is surely partly the work's fault as well. The performances succeed better in the Tableaux, which are colorful and warm and idiomatic (even though the sound picture sometimes swims a little since the orchestra isn't always ideally tidy). The sound quality, however, is relatively good if a little dry. Nonetheless, and despite its shortcomings, the adventurous will surely want to give this one a try - though I recommend turning to that Plasson disc first (which does, by the way, include an awful rendition of Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice - get it for the rarities, Lazzari and Duparc).
