GRAMOPHONE Review: Respighi Roman Trilogy – Orchestra Sinfonica Nationale della RAI/Trevino
Respighi’s obsession with the ‘Eternal City’ is writ spectacularly large in his three symphonic evocations and maybe in some subliminal way an Italian orchestra like this one can identify better than most with the mythic elements, pictorial…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Santtu conducts Mahler Symphony No. 2 ‘Resurrection’ – Philharmonia Orchestra/Santtu-Matias Rouvali
Like so much of what I’ve heard of Santtu’s work of late this Mahler 2 is decidedly hit and miss – with the emphasis, I regret to say, very much on the latter. It’s strange how the…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! – Soloists, Sinfonia of London/John Wilson
This is important. Oklahoma! was a big moment – perhaps the big moment – in musical theatre’s ‘coming of age’. Granted that sixteen years earlier Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern had already called time on the…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Price Piano Concerto/Symphony No 1/Ethiopia’s Shadow in America – His Resignation and Faith – Kanneh-Mason, Chineke!/Suganandarajah/Cox
It’s strange, but after decades of neglect the music of Florence Price seems uncannily familiar. The soulful themes with their American Deep South tinta, the trumpet-led brass chorales, the jazzy jubas – this is Price’s musical milieu…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Shostakovich Symphony No 14/Six Verses of Marina Tsvetayeva – BBC Philharmonic/ Storgards
With Shostakovich’s word-setting what happens between the words is, more than with any other composer I know (with the exception of Britten to whom the 14th Symphony is dedicated), reflected in what is happening between the notes.…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Walton Violin Concerto/Respighi Violin Sonata in B minor – RPO/Ward
What a shrewd coupling: seemingly unlikely bedfellows united not just by dint of having both been written in Italy (the Walton, of course, at his retreat in Ischia) but by a certain something in the water…the Mediterranean,…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Burnished Gold – Robyn Allegra Parton/Simon Lepper
It is refreshing to encounter a singer – Robyn Allegra Parton – whose gifts of curation are it would seem fully equal to her musicianship. You might argue that the album’s artwork is a sprinkling of gold-leaf…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Mahler Symphony No. 9 – Minnesota Orchestra/Vanska
Vanska’s Mahler 9 arrives in the wake of Rattle’s recent Bayrischen Rundfunk recording – his third of the piece – and perhaps the quality most found wanting by comparison with Rattle is warmth. It’s true that this…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Rachmaninov Symphonies 2 & 3 / Isle of the Dead – Philadelphia Orchestra/Nézet-Séguin
As with the first instalment of Nézet-Séguin’s symphonic Rachmaninov there’s a very real sense here of this music coming home, of a sound, a style, an ethos, in playing it that somehow – subliminally – gets passed…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Britten & Bruch Violin Concertos – Kerson Leong, Philharmonia Orchestra/Hahn
Kerson Leong’s splendid account of the Bruch comes hot on the heals of Ryan Goosby’s no less committed reading with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra. But there are notable differences in tone which might loosely be…