Tone Tempo

Recorded in the mid-1970s with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, this classic cycle of symphonies and tone poems firmly established Sir Colin Davis's reputation as one the greatest Sibelius interpreters. Nearly forty years on and the cycle remains as grand and dynamic as ever.

Since the beginning of his recording career, Colin Davis has been a champion of the music of Jean Sibelius, and his highly regarded cycle of the seven symphonies has been a mainstay of many LP and CD collections over the years. Recorded between 1975 and 1979 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and grouped here with the Violin Concerto and various famous tone poems, such as Finlandia, The Swan of Tuonela, and Tapiola, Davis' set is still a viable contender against other packages on the market, and listeners who want lucid interpretations will be hard pressed to find any that improve on these performances.

These discs in the Trio Series present some of the best orchestral music by Jean Sibelius, including "Lemminkäinen suite", "Night Ride and Sunrise", "Pohjola's Daughter," "En Saga," "The Oceanides," and "Tapiola". There are other favorites as well including "Valse Triste," and for some people lesser-known masterworks such as "Luonnotar", "Spring Song", "King Christian", and "The Bard". Sibelius emerges in these woks as a modern and tremendous composer who rarely fails when inspired by literature.

Carl Nielsen’s cycle of six symphonies is one of the most original orchestral corpuses of the late Romantic-early Modern era, with its ever-changing tonality, rich orchestration putting emphasis on wind instruments, and constant inventiveness. The Inextinguishable and the Four Temperaments are masterpieces that would be well-worth being performed more often outside Scandinavia.

“This time, I am not only an absolute musician, but also a poet”, wrote Dvořák regarding the Poetic Tone Pictures, Op. 85, his most extended cycle of lyric character pieces for piano. Concluded in April.

Handel wrote the secular oratorio Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (The triumph of Time and of Enlightenment) to the text of one of his patrons, Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, in Rome in 1707. The libretto, which doesn't stand up to close logical scrutiny, centers on Beauty, who must choose between self-indulgent Pleasure and the austerity of allegiance to Time and Enlightenment. Needless to say, any patron entering the theater for the performance, having noted the title on the playbill, would have no doubt about the outcome of the struggle, so dramatic suspense cannot have been one of the inducements for an eighteenth century audience. The rewards, however, are real, most notably Handel's remarkably fertile inventiveness and musical ingenuity, which justified sitting through a two-and-a-half-hour performance that was guaranteed to be a dramatic non-starter. Handel keeps recitatives to a minimum, and the oratorio is rich in musical substance and variety.