Sanderling Brahms

Known to Tchaikovsky as the ‘Russian Brahms’ and to Rachmaninov as ‘a master composer [and] a pinnacle of musical Moscow’, Sergey Taneyev was one of the most highly regarded and influential musical figures of his time. His unfinished Symphony No. 2, begun while Taneyev was a student at the Moscow Conservatoire, was recognised by his teacher, Tchaikovsky, as a work of considerable promise. It is heard here in Vladimir Blok’s edition, first performed in 1977. Taneyev’s Symphony No. 4, composed twenty years later, is a large-scale masterpiece considered by many to be his finest orchestral work.

It's one measure of a great performance that it focuses the attention so entirely on the music that you forget everything else. Another is that it banishes all thought of other performances from your mind. That both circumstances should apply with a work as familiar and over-recorded as the 'Emperor' is cause for celebration. This is just such a performance - which by definition presupposes such a perfect a unanimity of approach on the parts of conductor and soloist that one almost forgets (and how ironically!) that this is a concerto at all.

The Radio Legacy is a compilation of the seven part Anthology of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the four box sets devoted to the orchestra s chief conductors Willem Mengelberg, Eduard van Beinum, Bernard Haitink and Riccardo Chailly, and also featuring more recent recordings with Mariss Jansons.