Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt made her reputation with fine, distinctive recordings of Bach and other Baroque composers, treated pianistically but not anachronistically. Baroque specialists who record Classical and Romantic music, especially that of Beethoven, tend to generate unorthodox results; exhibit A was Hewitt's fellow Canadian Glenn Gould. Hewitt has undertaken her own Beethoven piano sonata cycle, and while her readings are not outrageous like Gould's, they're perhaps part of the same general family.
On this disc, Jean Guillou teams up with Edo DeWaart and the San Francisco Symphony for a lush performance of Camille Saint-Saens Symphony No. 3, popularly known as the Organ Symphony. This is a lush performance of the Organ Symphony with spot-on tempi, great orchestral balance, and unsurpassed balance between organ and orchestra. This symphony has one long melodic line after another, and DeWaart keeps a long view that prevents any sense of meandering. The organ is stunningly recorded. Brass blaze with glory. Strings are lush. Timpani are extremely well-defined. The clarity of the recording provides an excellent window into finer details. It is difficult to imagine how anything could have been improved upon. The disc is filled out with a strong performance of Widor's Allegro from his Symphony No. 6. This account of the Organ Symphony has everything going for it. There are no obvious weaknesses. If you have excellent subwoofers, they will get the workout of their life. Very Highly Recommended!
Written more than 15 years apart, these two scores, juxtaposed here for the first time, successively illustrate the somewhat morose ‘Nordic’ inspiration of the composer of Ein deutsches Requiem, then a more intimate poetic feeling, and finally a communicative serenity, the headiness of a ‘Hungarian’ dance in the Quartet, a sort of wild csárdás with quasi-orchestral force in the coda of the Quintet.