Symphony No. 6

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!

The Bamberger Symphoniker and Jakub Hrůša’s cycle of the four Brahms symphonies and Dvořák’s last four symphonies is the first recording to give an overview of their extraordinary universe and cast light on their musical affinity, in a vivid soundscape with a contemporary pulse.

Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, universally known as the Pathétique, is among the most deeply moving and profound of all works. An enduring masterwork which Tchaikovsky considered to be his greatest composition. Once again the struggle against ‘fate’ is central to this symphony which was to be the last Tchaikovsky wrote. The première took place in October 1893 at St. Petersburg and just eight days later the composer was dead. Few farewells in music are more poignant.

Aside from having been published consecutively, there isn't much to link Prokofiev's Waltz Suite, Op. 110, with his Symphony No. 6, Op. 111. The waltzes are delightful, charming, elegiac, a little bit creepy, but always ingratiating. The Symphony No. 6 is powerful, lyrical, tragic, very scary, and always monumental. The only thing they really have in common is Prokofiev's skill as an orchestrator and his powerful idenity as a composer. In this 1994 recording by Theodore Kuchar and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, both works are fully characterized and completely compelling. The waltzes are fey and affectionate with dancing rhythms and enchanting melodies. The symphony is massive and frightening with achingly beautiful themes and deeply tragic structures.

These pre-Chicago recordings of Fritz Reiner with the Pittsburghers is a reminder of his greatness as a conductor. It also restores to the catalog his recordings of some composers he wasn't closely identified with. Shostakovitch, for example, wasn't a regular on Reiner's studio schedule, but should have been, for this Sixth bristles with sardonic wit and energy. The Kodaly Dances, of course, were right up Reiner's alley, and get a smashing performance. The shorter works too, are first class, especially the Bart243;k Hungarian Sketches and another Reiner calling card, Kabalevsky's Colas Breugnon Overture. Weiner's string Divertimento is charming, but the real prize may be Glinka's Kamarinskaya, given a peformance that shimmers and glistens with delicacy and life. Sony's restoration of the 1945-1947 recordings is faultless.

The playing by the orchestra is super-human. This recording is by far the best performance in their already excellent series.

Suddenly, and not before time, the Sixth Symphony of Bruckner is riding high. And deservedly so since it is the tersest of his mature symphonies and the most openly exultant. Unlike the superficially more alluring Fourth, it needs a real musician to direct it, no mere master of orchestral ceremonies. What's more, it needs a Brucknerian with a passion for musical logic, a musical realist rather than a musical romantic. As such it is a work better suited to a Rosbaud, a Klemperer, or a Wand rather than someone like Jochum or Furtwangler however inspirational they may be at certain critical moments in the score.

These pre-Chicago recordings of Fritz Reiner with the Pittsburghers is a reminder of his greatness as a conductor. It also restores to the catalog his recordings of some composers he wasn't closely identified with. Shostakovitch, for example, wasn't a regular on Reiner's studio schedule, but should have been, for this Sixth bristles with sardonic wit and energy. The Kodaly Dances, of course, were right up Reiner's alley, and get a smashing performance. The shorter works too, are first class, especially the Bart243;k Hungarian Sketches and another Reiner calling card, Kabalevsky's Overture.

This recording presents two symphonies "on the theme of nature." Valid though this expression is, it nevertheless calls for quotation marks. Far from being a prefiguration of Beethoven's famous Pastoral, Justin Heinrich Knechts' Symphonie 'Portrait musical de la nature' represented a highly convincing attempt by it's composer to extricate himself from program music. It is exciting to hear these two works recorded together for the first time by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin directed by it's concertmaster, Bernhard Forck.