Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony is probably my least favorite of the bunch. I find it’s predominantly mournful character depressing, to say the least, but I guess it really resonates with a lot of people, and brings them in touch with the misery of Tchaikovsky’s later life, which perhaps explains its popularity and frequent appearance on orchestral programs. Paavo Jarvi is a superb conductor; his pacing in the slower opening movement and finale are spot-on, and he gives us a lilting second-movement waltz and a lively third-movement allegro. His use of orchestral color is magnificent, and helps lift the entire disc, including the oft-played Romeo and Juliet, to an even higher level of enjoyment and appreciation than our expectations would lead us to believe possible.

The disc was engineered by Michael Bishop, who’s also frequents the Audio Asylum hi-res forum, and never fails to offer insightful commentary about the nature of SACD, and SACD recording and mixing to the zany cast of characters that abound there. While I’m not always in agreement with his surround sound choices on jazz and more vocal-oriented jazz and pop material, his recordings in the classical arena are always head-and-shoulders above the pack, and this disc is no different from an acoustic standpoint. He manages to capture an accurate representation of Cincinnati’s Music Hall, and the orchestra occupies an exceptionally wide and deep soundstage. Very highly recommended.

– Tom Gibbs
 

This excellent disc is the first from German label Marc Aurel Edition I’ve had the pleasure to review in several years, since they merged with another German label, Raum Klang, and it’s obvious from listening that the combined effort of the two still turns out an exceptional product. Brahms’ youthful String Sextet No. 1 was, by all accounts, a resounding success, and helped cement Brahms’ reputation as a master of the Romantic repertory. Violinist Adolph Busch was born during Brahms’ lifetime (1891), and despite being renowned as a concert violinist, was a prolific composer, with seventy opus-numbered works to his credit, and an almost equal cross-section of unnumbered symphonies, concertos and chamber works. Both of the works presented here date from approximately each composer’s twenty-seventh year, and share a great deal in common stylistically.

The members of the Koln String Sextet have long and distinguished musical pedigrees, and they play these most German of compositions with exceptional virtuosity. The multichannel SACD was recorded at the German Radio Studios in Koln, and the recording captures a stage-level representation of the studio’s acoustic, which includes a significant amount of ambience – not at all the often dry acoustic associated with studio recordings. All I have to do is close my eyes to place each of the players within the very realistic soundfield. Very highly recommended – hopefully, there’s much more to come from this fruitful partnership. This is chamber music-making at its very best!

– Tom Gibbs
 

LSO Live’s recordings are just that – always sourced from live recordings at London’s Barbican, and while from the early outset they struck me as hit or miss, they often misfired, mostly due to their live nature. No matter how idiomatic the performance, or how incredible the playing – especially in a media format targeted at the audiophile market – if the sonics don’t measure up, the disc is essentially a failure. All LSO Live discs carry verbiage on the packaging that refers to their proprietary “high density” recordings, and that’s how the early batch of LSO Live discs struck me – dense, impenetrable soundfields that made any meaningful enjoyment of the performance next to impossible. In all likelihood, the problems stemmed from an inability on LSO Live’s part to effectively deal with the rather dry acoustic of the Barbican. Gladly to say, they seem to have remedied most of the sonic maladies, and my recent experience has proved quite enjoyable, with superb performance values accompanied by remarkably good sound, and at a bargain price to boot.

The mystery surrounding the Enigma Variations has dragged on for more than a century, with every few years new scholarly research offering up the “true meaning” behind the enigma. As the story goes, Elgar lit himself a cigar and sat at the piano one evening, engaged in sheer improvisation, when his wife interrupted him to remark that she really enjoyed “that tune.” He withdrew from his daydream and reconstructed his playing to her satisfaction, and that improvisational grain of thought became the source variation for the oft-debated Enigma Variations. Sir Colin Davis is infinitely familiar with this most Edwardian of English music, and he offers a performance that is both parts intimate and lovely, and brashly thrilling with truly impressive percussive dynamics. As filler, he offers a passionately conducted Introduction and Allegro for Strings. While this disc may come up a bit short at only 48 minutes, it makes up for in quality its shortcomings in quantity. Highly recommended.

– Tom Gibbs

Conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin has firmly established himself as one of the rising stars among Canadian classical artists; only late last year he was named music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic, to succeed the venerable Valery Gergiev, and he was recently named principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. In this jet-set world, how one finds time to move from Montreal to Rotterdam, London and elsewhere, and still find time along with live performances with multiple orchestras to record, I’ll never know. He has, however, given us this magnificent Bruckner 7th, recorded in the the marvelous acoustic of the Montreal’s Eglise Saint-Nom-de-Jesus, and in superb multichannel surround. This disc is definitely on my best-of list for 2007.

Most would probably pick the two complete Bruckner cycles by the great Eugen Jochum as the benchmark to compare this recording to, regardless of whether your preferences lean toward his EMI or DGG cycles. If you’re looking for a reference work, either of these choices is a good starting point. Yannick Nezet-Seguin has also chosen the Leopold Nowak edition of this symphony, which also aligns with Jochum’s personal preference. And while others have referred to this performance as “tensionless,” and suggested that musically, the dynamics are perhaps “murky,” I find nothing could be further from the truth – this is a Bruckner 7th for a new age, and sets a new benchmark for a recorded performance of this work. And the disc is sourced from a live recording – no mean feat in a media where live recordings are often marred by artifacts of their environment. This disc possesses all of the requisite tension and release that is the very essence of Bruckner, and the recording is incredible – on par with everything else I’ve come in contact with on SACD from ATMA. A very moving performance, and very highly recommended!

– Tom Gibbs

The centerpiece here is Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition, and conductor Danielle Callegari coaxes a first-rate performance from the orchestra. While not a lights-out lease buster (you won’t find anything like the Telarc bass drum here), the playing is superb, and never mannered. The Flemish forces offer performances that are very much in keeping with Ravel’s predominantly French oeuvre. While they may not offer the last word in a work (Pictures) that generally is given a more idiomatic Russian twist, the playing is beautiful throughout the balance of the disc, especially in the overtly French pieces by Debussy and Chabrier. Recommended.

– Tom Gibbs

This entertaining and often astonishing disc represents the first offering from a currently in-progress complete cycle of Beethoven Symphonies by the German Chamber Philharmonic, Bremen, and conductor Paavo Jarvi. The historically-informed presentation of these works proves, if anything, that the chamber approach to Beethoven can be both enjoyable and enlightening, and offers a truly valid alternative to the more typical big-band treatment that Beethoven generally is given. If this disc is representative of what’s to come, this cycle will undoubtedly become an instant classic and a necessary supplement to the multiple versions of these works already residing in your collection.

Notable in the presentations here are the relatively rapid tempi, especially as compared to more mainstream full orchestra recordings. The Eroica’s second movement, the Marche Funebre, in Karajan’s classic 1963 version on DGG, clocks in at nearly 18 minutes, while Paavo Jarvi traverses the same territory in only 13 minutes. A rather sprightly funeral march – at a tempo much more likely at home in New Orleans than Vienna! However, Jarvi’s reading retains all the requisite magisterial stateliness necessary to any successful performance of this material, and while a chamber symphony simply cannot compete with the big-box orchestras in massed climaxes, they nonetheless managed to instill sufficient bravado and ultimately carry the day. Equally surprising to me were the numerous instances throughout both symphonies where the true “chamber” quality of the orchestra was manifested; smaller assemblages effectively presented whole passages that are traditionally portrayed by massed groups of instruments. Despite multiple playings of this disc over the last few weeks – including multiple repeats of individual movements – I’m still really struck by the sensation of “newness” I’ve experienced hearing this infinitely familiar music; it’s almost like hearing it for the first time!

The sound quality is generally first-rate. I do, however, have one slight caveat – the sound is a bit close-up, and the acoustic is a touch dry for my personal tastes. There’s very little sense of the recorded acoustic, and this otherwise excellent disc would have been more well-served by the warmth of a nice church, rather than the somewhat sterile studio environment. Nonetheless, very highly recommended!

– Tom Gibbs
 

I have been agonizing over this disc for days now. All of the later piano music by Brahms on one huge, jam-packed disc in Super Audio! Sounds too good to be true, and in a way it is, for in the end it is the sound that proves perplexing to me. The first time I put it on I was not happy with the surround. It seems to dissipate the piano and give each discrete channel a bit of a watering-down effect, making the piano as a whole sound, well, a bit thin in tone. It is almost as if in the general surround excitement the engineers spread the sound too much. I don’t know—even now I am of two minds about it. But I can say that listening to it on headphones as I am while writing this is much more accommodating. This is not a close recording by any means. I would say the headphone perspective is about center aisle in a good concert hall. You hear everything with crystal clarity (and to many people this is the very definition of a great recording) and can certainly admire the many felicities of Georgian Leonskaja’s dexterity and ability to command the keyboard, but I still miss a certain presence.

Maybe it’s because of the years of listening to studio recordings where the piano thuds away at your eardrums like a bass drum in a bathroom, or maybe it’s because the 1901 Steinway D used in this recording just isn’t up to the task. No—I think it is the way the sound was captured. But Leonskaja also pushes when she should pull in some of these pieces, and seems somewhat emotionally detached in many of them. At least I don’t hear this same kind of neutrality when I listen to Arthur Rubinstein (Brahms was his favorite composer), Richard Goode, Julius Katchen, or, pre-eminently, Radu Lupu.

But I also might grow used to this perspective and feel differently about it in a year or so. I do promise to keep trying. Leonskaja has the chops for this, and something to say, and this is a great deal to have all of this music on one disc, and the SA sounds very good when in stereo mode. Perhaps I will learn to accept the surround better over time, but I can’t make a definitive judgment about it as yet. So there it is.

— Steven Ritter

[This is one of many “2+2+2” releases from MD&G on both SACD and DVD-A. They feel that for music in surround the center and subwoofer channels are not important, and instead they use those two channels for left and right height mics/speakers high above the front left and right speakers. The signals are compatible in standard 5.1 playback.  We will shortly be featuring some feature review articles covering the 2+2+2 system and most of the discs using this alternative approach – which works well but takes some effort to set up…Ed.]
 

This is the second disc of motets that I have reviewed in as many months. The first was a Hyperion release of his titanic Mass in E minor, with the motets as filler. That is a fine release, and I stand by my comments about it. But here we have all motets, including every single one found on the Hyperion, plus many more, and in stunning surround sound! What to do! Listen, listen, listen…

It was a pleasure of an unexpected sort spending two or three hours listening to this music. Far from inducing any sort of slumbering (as I had expected, because of the similarity of the type of music), this proved a remarkably exhilarating experience. The reason may be because of the varied instrumentation—trombones and organ may not seem like much of an addition, but believe me, when Bruckner writes for them you know the difference! Much of the music assumes orchestral proportions, and though it still strikes one as mainly meditative music, the beauties just keep on coming, and one comes away from the occurrence feeling spiritually nourished and even cleansed. Going back to the everyday chores of life seems even more of an intrusion.

The surround spread is wonderful, and the acoustics of the Husuv Church in Olomouc, Czech Republic are managed with great skill and understanding, though I find it somewhat amusing that Bruckner’s music (a Catholic) is recorded in a Hussite church. Never mind—they can record anything they want if the results are as fine as they are here. This program might not interest everyone, and even Bruckner fans might not know a lot of this music. But they won’t be sorry if they try.

— Steven Ritter

[This is one of many “2+2+2” releases from MD&G on both SACD and DVD-A. They feel that for music in surround the center and subwoofer channels are not important, and instead they use those two channels for left and right height mics/speakers high above the front left and right speakers. The signals are compatible in standard 5.1 playback.  We will shortly be featuring some feature review articles covering the 2+2+2 system and most of the discs using this alternative approach – which works well but takes some effort to set up…Ed.]
 

The organ and venue for this superb recording is the church of St. Francis de Sales in Lyons, blessed by the 1880 Cavaille-Coll that adorns it. This place was chosen to try and accurately reproduce the type of environment that Caesar Franck would have worked in, and was made necessary as his known haunts are no longer set up with the same instruments he worked with during his lifetime.

This magnificent SACD recording is the first volume in an attempt to record all of the extant liturgical music of the composer, and the corresponding organ pieces as well. Evidently this is not an easy task; much of the music was written and redone for various situations specific to a place and time. Sorting through the various scores and trying to determine the “original” intention involves a lot of detective work, knowledge of the period, Franck’s own preferences as noted by contemporaries, and a little common-sense guesswork. Even his organ registrations as present in many of the scores are not the originals, and so testimonies from his disciples such as Charles Tournemire are of prime importance.

The music is not what you might expect, the Romantic fevers of his Symphony in D minor, or the chromatic madness of so much of his popular organ music. Nor is it of the type a Gounod might have written – syrupy and sentimental; this is deliberate, beauteous music of great import, modern for its time (and some of it for ours), while at the same time intensely melodic and memorable. I was surprised at how often I could hum along with this music, having never heard much of it before. That’s how “predictable” its melodies are, though that should in no way be taken as a knock on this wonderful stuff. Just listen to the very last track, the psalm motet Dextera Domine, and try to get it out of your head all day.

We have a varied mix here, some organ only tracks, full chorus, chorus and soloists, and soloist(s) alone. The choir is of 14 boys, singing away at their French-pronounced Latin like they were born to do it, and all of the singers and soloists are wonderfully idiomatic. I was completely surprised by how much I enjoyed this, and look forward to volume 2. The sound is exquisitely captured, and in a church this size it cannot have been easy. Great stuff!

— Steven Ritter
 

The album cover says “WARNING: Extreme surround sound”, which I took with some bemusement at the idea of a record company planning to blow out their customer’s speakers, the same way that Telarc used to do. So I can only take the warning in that manner, though the extreme surely refers to the greater-than-usual spatial possibilities that this disc takes advantage of. Nordheim, whom the Norwegians refer to as the “flagship” of their national music these days, is a refugee from the sixties days of the avantgarde, and I must say that I was not especially looking forward to engaging his newest material close up.

The fact that this is a percussion album mixed with electronics only heightened my anxiety. Generally speaking, I cannot stand this kind of stuff, but felt I could give it a decent review because when I was studying composition in the seventies, this type of “music” was all the rage, indeed sui generis in academia. Thank goodness those days are over, but it can still prove interesting to re-evaluate some of this kind of music from the nice distance that we now enjoy, contemporary though this disc is.

It is a mixed bag. Colorazione is the same kind of static stuff that Morton Subotnick did in Silver Apples of the Moon on an old Nonesuch LP – one revered by the aesthetic- oriented deconstructionists of the day, but Subotnick had more of a plan to get from A to B. Link is the rewritten and rescored result of Respons III, a four percussionists, organ and electronics work that the composer desired to have condensed for only two players. Again, I do not know where it is trying to go, and perhaps that is part of the plan, but otherwise the music sounds to me like a succession of events and nothing else. This is not virgin territory for me, nor am I particularly prudish about the murmurings of the extreme modernists; it’s just that I find much of this has lost its shock or even surprise value, and now sounds tired and predictable in its unpredictable-ness, with “events” consisting of sounds, bells, and noises substituting for real musical flow and understanding.

The songs (Five Kryptofonier) are the most interesting, probably for their verbal content that one can at least attempt to tie into what one hears at any given moment, though that too could be a mistake. But then, as if to prove to me and me alone that he can write extraordinarily beautiful music, I listen to the gorgeous First Butterfly and am completely enchanted. This Takemitsu/Debussy piece is simply one of the loveliest things I have ever heard, and its structure is almost as simple as that of a pop song.  It was originally written for harp and soprano, but the electronic realization here is stunningly effective, and I suppose I will now have to keep this album just for this one five-minute piece, much to my chagrin. It does not save it, and I cannot recommend it to you unless you like electronics with percussion, and the sixties I suppose. But the surround sound is done very nicely, and on a particular day with your favorite abusive substance in hand you might actually appreciate it. [Thanks but at such time I’ll dig my Moody Blues SACD instead…Ed.]

— Steven Ritter