New York Philharmonic & Leonard Bernstein Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 17 "little Russian" (1972 2018)

Beethoven’s Fifth, described by one writer as "the most powerful work of musical rhetoric in orchestral literature," is surely the best-known symphony ever written. But how well do you really know this masterpiece? There are so many novel, forward-looking elements in it that it took years for some people to accept it as anything but unintelligible modern music.

Following the long & rocky road to the 1st Symphony, on which, due to his teaching duties at the Moscow Conservatory, Tchaikovsky had been forced to work at night, the 2nd Symphony was composed mainly in the summer of 1872, hot on the heels of his 2nd opera, The Oprichnik. At this time, Tchaikovsky was once again taking a holiday on the country estate of his sister Aleksandra, located near the Ukrainian town of Kamianka, in the Kiev Governerate. Numerous anecdotes report Tchaikovsky’s touching assertion that he was not the true creator of the work, but rather, that it actually had been composed by a Pyotr Gerasimovich, 1 of the older servants in the household of his sister & her husband, Lev Davydov, for it was Pyotr Gerasimovich who had sung the folksong, The Crane, to him, which provided the basis for the work’s finale.

Les danses hongroises n°5 et 6 de Brahms (respectivement captées en 1967 et 1966) mettent d'entrée de jeu l'auditeur au parfum : c'est à une démonstration de dynamisme et de lyrisme que le grand chef américain nous convie. Ces danses de Brahms se hissent parmi les meilleures, et ne font poindre qu'un seul regret : qu'il n'y en ait que deux !
Les Préludes de Liszt (1963) nous rappellent alors quelles formidables affinités Bernstein trouvait dans l'univers lisztien (il faut connaitre absolument sa fantastique Faust-Symphonie ).

Muti's Tchaikovsky cycle with the Philharmonia is one of the most consistent ever, with the conductor's high voltage tempered by expressive warmth and keen fantasy …

On the eve of his centenary in 2018, Sony Classical releases the most important collection, Leonard Bernstein’s classic American Columbia recordings, remastered from their original 2- and multi-track analogue tapes. This has allowed for the creation of a natural balance (for example, between the orchestra and solo instruments) that brings the quality of these half-century-old recordings, excellent for their time, up to the standards of today’s audiophiles. In addition, there has been a meticulous restoration of some earlier masterings in which LP surface noise was too rigorously eliminated at the expense of the original brilliance.

Carlo Maria Giulini was born in Barletta, Southern Italy in May 1914 with what appears to have been an instinctive love of music. As the town band rehearsed he could be seen peering through the ironwork of the balcony of his parents’ home, immovable and intent. The itinerant fiddlers who roamed the countryside during the lean years of the First World War also caught his ear. In 1919, the family moved to the South Tyrol, where the five-year-old Carlo asked his parents for "one of those things the street musicians play". Signor Giulini acquired a three-quarter size violin, setting in train a process which would take his son from private lessons with a kindly nun to violin studies with Remy Principe at Rome’s Academy of St Cecilia at the age of 16.