Leonard Slatkin Mahler 2 Sacd

These are very solid performances from Slatkin, but the recording is the star here. The Elite recordings from Aubort and Nickrenz are simply some of the finest analogue (or any) recordings of orchestras in real acoustic spaces ever made. And Mobile Fidelity, as always, has done them justice, in full. The results are startlingly realistic sounding in timbre, coherence, transparency and staging.

Leonard Slatkin celebrated his 75th birthday in September 2019. Many of the selections in this program come from a concert given in his honor and are also a tribute to his remarkable musical family, both past and present. Historical recordings include Leonard’s cellist mother, Eleanor Aller, being conducted by Korngold in the Haydn concerto and a 1944 broadcast of his father, Felix, as a solo violinist in Brahms. Every piece here has a deeply personal connection for the family. For his composition The Raven, Leonard used Edgar Allan Poe’s poem in a work that is “almost like a concerto for speaker and orchestra.”

V. Williams is a composer representing British late-blooming nationalist music. Synthesizing the influences of his country's folk songs, musical traditions, and Impressionism, he has established a gentle, conservative, yet unique style. These symphonies, which express the anxieties and hopes of modern people, are his signature works, and are characterized by their grandeur, beauty, and familiarity. Slatkin's performance is a masterpiece with a very clear and clean interpretation.

Of all Berlioz’s Shakespeare-inspired works, Roméo et Juliette is unquestionably his masterpiece. It is also cast in an innovative new form, a kind of ‘super-symphony’ that incorporates elements of symphony, opera and oratorio. Berlioz composed no singing roles for the central characters, but allowed others to comment or narrate, giving latitude to incarnate the lovers in a musical language of extraordinary delicacy and passion. The vivid Ball Scene and Romeo at the Capulet tomb are intensely dramatic but the heart of the work is the Love Scene, a long symphonic poem which Richard Wagner called ‘the melody of the 19th century’.

Leonard Slatkin is an exceptionally versatile conductor, but it is perhaps in French repertoire of the 19th and 20th centuries that he feels most comfortable. The singers in Ravel's exquisitely formed little comic opera L'Heure espagnole, complete with cheating lovers hidden inside grandfather's clocks carried up and down stairs, are all entirely appropriate and admirably clear, but it is really Slatkin who's the star here, right from the "Introduction" that's so artfully linked to what follows. Ravel here cultivates a kind of updated accompanied recitative, well matched to his stated goal of reviving the old tradition of Italian opera buffa.

Slatkin's recording of Tchaikovsky's "Little Russian" Symphony (No 2 in C minor) is very good. Slatkin uses an expansive tempo in the Allegro of I, but the music never drags. In short Slatkin and the virtuoso musicians of the Saint Louis Symphony serve Tchaikovsky's early symphony very well. The impression they give is one of massiveness and confidence, and it works!

When Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev visited Hollywood in the late 1930s, his friend and American champion, maestro Leopold Stokowski, was recording The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, to be used in Fantasia. Prokofiev was indelibly impressed by Walt Disney’s work. He saw how the Disney artists made their animation efforts adhere closely to pre-recorded music tracks; he experienced the click track, a device developed by Disney to ensure that sight and sound were closely coordinated. He then returned to Russia to work with Sergei Eisenstein on the epic film Alexander Nevsky.

Having already extensively explored Leopold Stokowski's famous Bach transcriptions, Chandos now turns to famous arrangements by everyone else. There are some real discoveries here, particularly Raff's warmly Romantic setting of the famous D minor Chaconne, which has some amazingly Brahmsian moments and clearly deserves an occasional airing in concert.