An excellent album of works by a composer whose musical trajectory was almost as varied as Stravinsky’s, but much less well-known.

The world continues to shrink! First we have Philippe Herreweghe and his Champs-Elysées forces in Bruckner’s mighty Fifth Symphony with an orchestra of just 68. Then Thomas Dausgaard and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra in a convincing reading of another Bruckner symphony, this time the Second. Robyn Ticciati’s outstanding Symphonie Fantastique a couple of years ago belled the cat about how Berlioz can sound with smaller forces: this emotional roller coaster, where passion so often becomes an extreme sport lacked nothing in drama and, well, passion in their account. This current super-audio disc represents Ticciati’s latest foray into Berlioz. I listened to this release with a Berlioz expert and asked him not to reveal his reaction until after I’d written this revue. When he read it, he concurred completely. We both loved both the performances and the interpretation. The early La Morte de Cleopâtre sees the up-and-coming mezzo-soprano Karin Cargill in quite superb voice. Their can be no greater praise heaped on her than to say that, not since Dame Janet Baker’s recording more than 40 years ago has the worked been so successfully and graphically sung. It has just the right degree of histrionic agony as well as plenty of…

This CD hails from a 1983 live Royal Festival Hall concert at a time when this symphony was much less known than it is now. In the intervening years, many of the usual suspects have recorded it, often as part of an integral cycle. This recording, however, wears its age particularly well! Rozhdestvenksy had been at the apex of Shostakovich interpreters for years, even in 1983, and his experience shows in the flowing tempo and rhythmic variation in the huge adagio arc of the first movement (almost the length of the other movements combined) without losing either drama or intensity. The string playing is first rate. A relentless unremitting trudge often casts a shadow from which the remainder of the work never recovers. Even by the standards of Shostakovich’s highly original approach to symphonic structure, the Eighth is certainly problematic. Rozhdestvensky’s account of the two bizarrely juxtaposed scherzi brings out the usual ‘bi-polar’ elements of Shostakovich’s scores in this vein: manic almost febrile gaiety alternating with militaristic aggression and grotesque hecticness. The trumpet episode in the second demonstrates the fine quality of the soloists in the London Philharmonic at that time. The final two movements pose more interpretive challenges: perhaps…

Performances of Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto range from the romantic/rhapsodic (Shaham/ Boulez/BPO) to the gritty, abrasive and uncompromising (Mullova), with Mutter somewhere in- between. Thomas Zehetmair, a native of Salzburg, has been around for a long time but I wouldn’t have had him down as an arch exponent of the mighty Bartók Second Violin Concerto, one of the greatest concertos for any instrument of the twentieth century. Well, he is! There’s something excitingly kaleidoscopic and mercurial about this 1995 performance. His rhythms are nimble, his tone slender but full of coruscating folkloric colours. One thing I initially found disconcerting are his tempi: he takes 35’ over the work which makes it sound quite different; Shaham takes over 40’ which, I think, is closer to the norm. The Budapest Festival Orchestra, generally regarded for some years as Hungary’s premier ensemble, especially under Ivan Fischer, enhance the soloist and conductor in what amounts to a symphonic accompaniment wonderfully captured. The companion piece is Bartók’s First Violin Concerto, an early work sometimes dismissed as an expression of love-sickness over his inamorata, Stefi Geyer. It wasn’t discovered until after both the composer and Geyer had died, in 1956. It’s OK but very much a…

This set is a cornucopia of glorious conducting and orchestral playing. While it’s impossible to generalise about works as gargantuan as Wagnerian melodramas, I can’t help thinking, having soaked up this set over a period of weeks, that people who find the contemporary interpretations of Levine, Barenboim & Thielemann faceless, may be onto something. The recordings range from Hans Knappertsbusch with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1927 or 1928, to his Munich recordings of 1962. The sound ranges from the just acceptable to the relatively modern. Knappertsbusch was famously – or notoriously – slow, depending on your point of view, in Wagner. However, there was never any dissent about his unique ability to preserve a line or arc, gradually and convincingly accumulating tension. When it came to architectural grandeur, no one could top “Kna” in these excerpts from Rienzi, Die Fliegender Höllander, the Lohengrin Act 1 Prelude (aptly described by the liner note writer as Wagner’s first piece of truly transcendent music) Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Overture and Parsifal Prelude in Munich and another Meistersinger Overture coupled with extracts from Die Walküre, Parsifal & Tannhäuser in Berlin. Intriguingly, the Meistersinger Overture in 1928 took 8’34. By the 1962 Munich performance, it……

Globalisation, in terms of international orchestral performing standards, seems to be the high tide which has lifted many boats! Excellent Bruckner performances are no longer the exclusive domain of the illustrious ensembles of Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig, Dresden and Amsterdam. Last year I reviewed a persuasive Bruckner Five with Philippe Herreweghe and the Champs-Elysées forces – an orchestra of only 68! Donald Runnicles had critics diving for the thesaurus with his 2012 Proms Bruckner Eight (which he also conducted in Sydney a few weeks earlier) with the BBC Scottish Orchestra. His flair for maintaining lucid textures while blending different orchestral voices was singled out for particular praise, as they are here in Bruckner’s Seventh. That said, however, I take issue with the Guardian reviewer who spoke of this performance as expansive. At 60 minutes? You must be joking! Even Solti, who rarely stopped to smell the flowers, managed to take 70 minutes in his second recording. Runnicles provides an uneccentric account. The stopwatch can be an unreliable ally, especially here where, paradoxically, his tempi don’t actually sound as swift as the overall duration would indicate. They are also well integrated and the gradation of the climaxes. His ability to know how…

The only gripe I have with this otherwise splendid CD is the fact that the three works are not presented in chronological order, especially as they represent the three distinct musical periods in Szymanowski’s chameleon-like composing career and are quite different from each other in idiom. The otherwise excellent Chandos usually gets this sort of thing right. In its “spangled bumptiousness”, as one deathless description had it, the Concert Overture, composed in 1904, is an unashamed homage to Richard Strauss, especially reminiscent of Don Juan with the opening vaulting motif followed by the a tender, lyrical theme. I hope it won’t be the kiss of death when I reveal that the Second Symphony (1909-10) was influenced by Max Reger’s fin-de-siècle hothouse chromaticism, although, fortunately, it lacks his academic dryness. The idiom is more akin to the intense ambience of Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, though without its thicket-like orchestral textures. It begins curiously with a violin solo, and moments of intimacy are overshadowed by a hankering for expressive climaxes. The second movement opens with a lovely string melody followed by charming Rococo variations including a gavotte and a minuet before the various strands are woven into a highly convincing contrapuntal finale….

Valentina Lisitsa virtually invented herself through social media and is supposedly the most viewed pianist on YouTube. If this is supposed to imbue her with cachet, I’m afraid it’s lost on me. The liner notes in this set read more like a media release, giving us chapter and verse about her doubts and tribulations (as if these were somehow unique to her) and adopt an unduly reverential tone, hardly worthy of a label like Decca. Since she and her husband (with whom she initially attempted a duo pianist career before abandoning it for a solo career) sank their life savings into this project and allegedly paid for the LSO, conductor and venue themselves, one can only wish them luck. One review has described this undertaking as the latter-day equivalent of vanity publishing. Lisitsa mentions that there was no rehearsal and she hadn’t met the conductor before the recording sessions. It shows in the playing – competent, the least one would expect from the LSO, but hardly incandescent. The First and Fourth concertos have never really interested me very much. The Fourth seems to try (unsuccessfully) to incorporate jazz and the slow movement has the misfortune to bear a resemblance to……

One acerbic US critic dismissed Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony as “a woolly mammoth which emerged after the Stalinist freeze”. Once upon a time I would have said, “I wish I’d thought of that!” Now, I’m not so sure. Yes, it’s still a sacred monster and Gergiev’s reading lasts more than 82 minutes (two and a half minutes longer than his previous effort, which also featured the bizarre combination of both the Rotterdam and Kirov orchestras because, apparently, the composer wanted the work played by two ensembles – a fact new to me). However, I’d forgotten just how much of the score is actually quite dark and brooding. This reading has none of the agonized, self-dramatised protraction of Bernstein’s mid- 1980s version with the Chicago Symphony (his only recorded foray with that orchestral war machine) which clocks in at 85 minutes. In this version with the Mariinsky Orchestra (formerly Kirov) Gergiev demonstrates again what a superb orchestral builder he is. Unlike, say, Petrenko in Liverpool, whose orchestra has long had exposure through a large of body of recordings, the Kirov Orchestra was largely unknown in the West before Gergiev’s emergence as a major podium force. There’s little agit- prop bombast here, and……

This DVD, recorded at a concert in Singapore’s Esplanade Hall as part of the Orchestra’s 2010 Southeast Asian Australasian tour, brought back fond memories of the same program – Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances and Mahler’s First Symphony – of the Berlin Philharmonic’s appearance at the Sydney Opera House, in a what-are-we-going-to-do-with-the-rest-of-our-lives experience. The Rachmaninov work, his 
last orchestral score, has always 
been an enigma, part Slavic
 nostalgia and part darkly sinister 
glamour, with a dash of Hollywood
 glitz. Rattle’s tempo for the juddering introduction is the most dangerously slow I’ve ever heard. In Sydney, I was still so overwhelmed by the sensation of actually having heard them tuning (almost worth 
the ticket price in itself) just a few yards away, that I failed to notice just how slow 
it was, but what better way to experience simultaneously its unique fusion of heft
and finesse? The saxophone solo is just
 the first of countless wonderful moments throughout the spectral waltz and the
 driven finale, where almost any other orchestra would feel pushed to the point of disintegration, instead of simply heightening the tension with complete control and rock-solid ensemble. Herbert von Karajan, chief conductor of the Orchestra for more than 30 years, resisted……

I’m beginning to think that Mahler’s First Symphony is conductor-proof. Almost every version I’ve heard lately has merit and Marin Alsop’s with the Baltimore Symphony is no exception, despite an overall restraint. The opening of the first movement, surely one of the most magical of any symphony, is very slow until the explosion in the coda. In fact, the first three movements are all slightly slower than usual, whereas the final one is slightly swifter. Perhaps the second Scherzo/Ländler movement lacks the last ounce of what Germans call schwung – bounce or swing – but the central section doesn’t sound too inebriated, as it sometime can. I wondered whether or not it was just me who thought that the third-movement funeral march (Frère Jacques in a minor key) seemed to have been recorded at a higher level than the rest, and I’ve since discovered another review which garnered the same reaction. Another unwelcome development is the double bass melody, which forms the backbone of the movement, being played by the entire section, not a solo. The same reviewer who noticed the disparate recording levels also points out, helpfully, that the Jewish klezmer music in the trio is conducted with what……

Osmo Vänskä’s “trim, taut and terrific” approach to Sibelius survives into his second cycle where the First Symphony, at just 34 minutes, almost manages to efface completely the traditional Tchaikovskian breadth. Fortunately, we still hear plenty of harp throughout, especially in my favourite passage, the exquisitely delicate section of the slow movement where the woodwinds and triangle are quite magic. If symphonies were people, Sibelius’s Fourth would be the ultimate anti-hero. Here, tempi
 are much more conventional
 and Vänskä moulds the music superbly in the opening movement where the fusion of bleakness and inscrutability as they materialise out of Stygian gloom is strangely beautiful and moving. The second- movement Scherzo peters out in a strange, almost sinister, ellipsis, but it is in the slow movement – the emotional core of the work – where the particles simply stop vibrating as the temperature reaches absolute zero and Vänskä plumbs the depths with the best of them. In the final movement Sibelius, seemingly perversely, introduces glockenspiel and tubular bells, of all instruments. Most conductors opt for one or the other. (In one recording, Ormandy uses both,
 but not together.) Vänskä, wisely I think, uses the former, as tubular bells always sound to……