Shostakovich - The Dance Album - Chailly, Philadelphia Orchestra

 

Release Date: 04/15/1997 Label: Decca Number of discs: 1 Composer: Dmitri Shostakovich Performer: Riccardo Chailly, Philadelphia Orchestra cd info/ buy

Review:

This disc was nominated for the 1998 Grammy Award for "Best Orchestral Performance." Contrary to popular opinion, Dmitri Shostakovich was not just a "serious" composer. “The Dance Album”, an inspired collection Shostakovich's "entertainment" music (or as some musicologists like to consider it, the lighter side of Shostakovich), proves that angst and torment were not the only temperaments associated with this great composer. Remarkably, Shostakovich often found himself in circumstances that required him to work on serious and lighter works at virtually the same time. 'The Gadfly,' a delightfully boisterous film score, was written between the Tenth Symphony and the First Violin Concerto. Shortly after the commercial fiasco of his opera 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,' Shostakovich wrote 'Moskva, Cheremushki,' a three-act musical comedy which shows the composer's immense talent for pastiche and parody. "The Bolt" is a ballet that tells the story of a band of workers in a new industrial society pitted against drunks, loafers and all sorts of layabouts. It includes a wide range of comical effects, from the work's opening parody of Tchaikovsky's Fourth symphony to the prevalence of squawking brass lines that serves to characterize many of the ballet's eccentric characters.

 

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Saint-Saens - Symphony No.3 in C Minor, Op.78 - Murray, Ormandy, Philadelphia Orchestra

 

Release Date: October 25, 1990 Label: Telarc Number of discs: 1 Composer: Camille Saint-Saens Performer: Murray, Ormandy, Philadelphia Orchestra cd info/ buy

Review:

I can pay no higher compliment to this performance by Ormandy, the Philadelphians and Telarc than to say, that this is the only performance that is as perfect and as moving as the Charles Munch/Boston Symphony Orchestra RCA performance from 1959. That CD has the well-earned status as the benchmark of perfection in performance, even after forty years. I've probably owned a dozen recordings of this symphony and this is the one I invariably come back to, along with the one by Charles Munch. However, this one is so splendidly recorded, I believe it is an essential recording. Ormandy gives one of his last & greatest performances, and the Philadelphians clearly want to leave him a legacy, pulling all of the emotional depth present in the Munch/Boston/RCA release. Murray proves why he has earned so much respect as an organist & interpreter of French Organ repertoire. This recording is a little unique in that the recording space sounds quite large, and it has a little more reverberation than most, but Telarc did a magnificent job in being able to pick up so much detail. I cannot say enough about the detail of the woodwinds they achieve while still capturing the Philadelphia Orchestra's famed string (and brass) sections. The only possible way it could be any better is that the fast piano runs in the last scherzo are just a tad more faint than in most recordings due to the reverberation & recording space, but that is an extremely minor flaw compared to the richness of detail found all over this recording. The adagio of this symphony alone is worth the price of this disc. Ormandy, like Munch plumbs the depths of aching, of deep longing & the eventual ecstatic peace that make the adagio as admired as anything written by Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms or Mahler. I really believe that any of them would have been deeply moved if they heard this peace, and of course Mahler certainly did, and must have admired it deeply! Saint-Saens himself admitted, sincerely & quite humbly, after finishing this symphony, that he could do no more. He had achieved perfection, and Ormandy, Murray & the Philadelphians have paid tribute to Saint-Saens by doing the same.--Amazon

 

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Sibelius - Symphonies 4 and 7 - Ormandy, Philadelphia Orchestra

 

 

Great news! Arkivmusic.com has gotten its "on demand" hands on the Japanese RCA Ormandy Edition, making these recordings available in North America at far saner prices. Some of these performances are outstanding, nowhere more so than here--one of the greatest Sibelius recordings ever made. Eugene Ormandy's Fourth Symphony is magnificent: gaunt, direct, and unflinching, with stunning string playing and the most intelligent approach on disc to the percussion conundrum in the finale (chimes at the "sonore" climax, glockenspiel everywhere else). Some listeners might prefer a swifter tempo in the scherzo, but this interpretation is all of a piece, taking in the work as if in one sweeping gesture, and Sibelians will understand just what that means.

The Seventh also is a perfectly paced, immaculately played performance, with none of the mannerisms in the pastoral interlude that disturb Ormandy's first recording for Sony. As for the tone poems, there is no finer performance of Oceanides available anywhere, and Pohjola's Daughter is just about as good. Ormandy could come across as a somewhat stiff and unsmiling interpreter, but not here, and particularly not in music that requires an absolutely logical, indeed mathematical approach to tempo relationships between sections. Both in terms of performance quality and programming (Sibelius at his very greatest throughout), it just doesn't get any better.

The Japanese edition apparently used original unaltered sources, meaning the tapes were not remastered in any way, and so vary widely in sound quality--from very good, as here, to virtually unlistenable (Mahler Second). So until someone goes back and redoes them from scratch--and we may have a very long wait--you will have to buy selectively. These recordings, from the late 1970s, stand among the best-sounding of the lot. A magnificent release that you won't want to miss!—David Hurwitz

CD INFO

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