Leonard Slatkin Prince Rostislav Rachmaninov Sinfonia 1

Leonard Slatkin conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra for this recording of Bizet's Carmen Suites Nos. 1 & 2 and a Suite from Grieg's Peer Gynt. Originally recorded by the audiophile label Telarc in 1979 this is an exceptional sounding release highlighting the well-known pieces of music written by George Bizet and Edvard Grieg.

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.

The impact of Russian and Oriental culture on Ravel’s formative years retained a hold on him throughout his life. His colourfully re-orchestrated selections from Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite ‘Antar’ and opera Mlada, with interpolations of his own music, as the incidental score for a theatre production are heard here in their première recording, revived and reconstructed alongside a new text that symbolizes the romance and chivalric spirit of Antar the warrior-poet and his beloved Abla. Ravel’s fascination with the exotic is brought together with Debussy’s influence in the ravishing and enduringly popular song cycle Shéhérazade

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.

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.

To celebrate the inauguration of the newly restored former organ of the Palais du Trocadéro and Palais de Chaillot in Paris, the Orchestre National de Lyon and their organist-in-residence, Vincent Warnier, present two major works for organ and orchestra by Camille Saint-Saëns. Both are historically linked with the great Cavaillé-Coll organs, and are performed with an arrangement for solo organ of his famous Danse macabre.

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!