Kong Audio

Popularity seems to rest as much on chance as on merit, for it is difficult to understand why the Turandot Suite has never become a popular repertory piece. It has all the qualities of melodic appeal (its fifth movement quotes Greensleeves), resourceful invention and brilliant orchestral colour that should ensure its popularity. The two Studies, the Sarabande and Cortège, written in preparation for his opera, Doktor Faust, remain the composer’s masterpiece, highly searching and imaginative music that can claim to be profound, as, indeed, can the Berceuse élégiaque. Both performances and recording are very good, and this disc serves as an admirable and inexpensive introduction to a fascinating and underrated master.

David Atherton made a fine reputation for himself as a contemporary music conductor back in his salad days with the London Sinfonietta, nowhere more so than in his three-disc (now two-CD) set of music by Kurt Weill. He certainly hasn’t lost his magic touch in the intervening years. These performances of the two symphonies sweep the (not very full) board. Swift, lean, incisive, and always exciting, Atherton reveals all of this music’s anger, irony, and bittersweet lyricism without a trace of histrionics or self-indulgence. Indeed, a certain coolness is part of the point too. And so in the marvelous Second Symphony, Atherton catches the neo-classical temper of its outer movements with impeccable wit and grace, making the passionate intensity of the magnificent central slow movement all the more shocking as a result.