Brainwave Symphony CD 4

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!

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts (b. 1972) is known for his distinctive and richly coloured musical voice. Making their label début, Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra perform Kevin Puts’ Symphony No.4 (From Mission San Juan), inspired by Native American melodies. Opening this programme of world première recordings, Craig Hella Johnson leads Conspirare in two choral settings of texts by women poets: 'To Touch the Sky' and 'If I Were a Swan'.

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 4 – Laura Claycomb, soprano; San Francisco Symphony; Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor
Classical | 1 CD | EAC Rip | 242 MB | FLAC+LOG+Cue | Full scans | RS links
Publisher: San Francisco Symphony | Recorded: 2003 | Published: 2003

After a terrific First Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas' ongoing Mahler cycle with his San Francisco players really hits its stride with this latest release, one of the truly great recordings ever lavished on the Fourth… This is by any standard an extraordinary achievement, and no one who loves Mahler or this symphony can afford to pass it by. –David Hurwitz

Gösta Nystroem may have been diffident in his life decisions – he only chose music as a career in his mid-thirties – but it is clear from the two works on this 2004 BIS release that he was an earnest composer indeed when he set his mind to it. Perhaps too earnest: the Symphony No. 4, "Sinfonia shakespeariana," and the Symphony No. 6, "Sinfonia Tramontana," are long essays of some technical competence, but also unrelievedly gray, joyless creations that require a great deal of patience to get through.

This double album consists of Tchaikovsky performances that have been issued in several different forms. The Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 was recorded in 2012, when the Arctic Philharmonic Orchestra, a joint project of the cities of Tromsø and Bodø, was still called the Nordic Philharmonic; from a marketing point of view, with graphics showing the orchestra members, instruments and all, standing in the snow, the name change was a good one.

These are modern, big band, 21st-century readings of Brahms’s Second and Fourth Symphonies. Textures are clear and transparent, so that we hear details of inner voices and the felicities of the composer’s wind-writing for flutes and oboes. Timpani are also quite prominent. Tempos, especially in the Second Symphony’s first movement, strike me as a bit on the measured side, but still within the mainstream.

In this first volume of Alexander Scriabin's symphonies on the LSO Live label, Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra begin in media res with the Symphony No. 3, "Le Divin Poème," and the Le Poème de l'extase, which is unofficially counted as the Symphony No. 4. These works date from Scriabin's middle period (ca. 1902-1908), which marks a transition from his youthful Romantic phase to his final visionary works. The Symphony No. 3 reflects a lingering attachment to the symphonic conventions which influenced Scriabin's first two symphonies, particularly in its three-movement structure and relatively clear tonal scheme, though it already hints at the organic development and greater harmonic complexity of the single-movement Le Poème de l'extase, which strains the boundaries of form and key. These effusive works demand a calculated control that may seem at odds with their volatile and languorous expressions, though Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra deliver the music with rhythmic precision and focused tone colors to bring across Scriabin's kaleidoscopic soundworld with brilliance.