L’oiseau de Soleil – Wilbur Smith

The practice of performing music on original instruments was once the exclusive domain of early music specialists who sought to revive the characteristic sounds of Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical instruments and ensembles scaled to proper size. The so-called "historically informed movement" eventually expanded into re-creating 19th century music, which yielded some ear-opening performances; but this practice soon began to overlap with modern interpretation and instrumentation, so the actual differences between period and modern strings or winds were minimal.

This twenty-year-old release comes from a time when Myung-whun Chung, a surprise appointment to the new Opera Bastille, suddenly emerged on DG as their leading French conductor. He comes from Korea's first family of classical music and was a gifted, prize-winning pianist before taking to the podium. It's very worthwhile to backtrack and find his early CDs - they are often of very high quality even if they have more or less sliped through the cracks.