Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra Mariss Jansons Shostakovich Rehersal

Born in Prague in 1979, the composer, conductor and chorus master Ondrej Adámek, who studied in his Czech hometown and in Paris, has already won numerous prestigious awards for his orchestral, chamber, vocal and electro-acoustic music. In his musical language, which also repeatedly incorporates elements of distant cultures, he creates unusual musical narratives. He seeks the authenticity of his interpretations by combining voices and movements, gestures and theatricality, phonetic and semantic aspects, and his own specially developed musical instruments.

Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra enjoyed a long and intensive artistic collaboration, which came to an abrupt end with Haitink's death in October 2021. BR-KLASSIK now presents outstanding and previously unreleased live recordings of concerts from past years. This recording of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony documents concerts given in November 1981 at the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz.

Sarah Chang is certainly an exceptional player; her finely produced tone is characteristically sweet, yet she varies it most imaginatively — in the Concerto's slow movement, for instance, where she follows the changing shades of emotion in the most detailed way. The first movement may have been recorded with more strongly expressed feeling (by Boris Belkin), its finale with more mercurial displays of virtuosity (Xue-Wei), but overall Chang is the equal of any, with relaxed technical command and real feeling for the music. The accompaniment is well balanced and cleanly recorded, with distinguished solo contributions from woodwind and horns.