Shostakovithc Symphony 4

The Danish orchestra under Michael Schønwandt play clearly… Dietrich Henschel as the Harper and Roland Wagenführer as the Youth are both excellent.

At a time when many of his contemporaries were exploring more fluid structures, Franz Schmidt while perhaps stretching tonal harmony to its limits, continued to embrace 19th-century form and achieved a highly personal synthesis of the diverse traditions of the Austro-German symphony. His language, rather than being wedded to a narrative of dissolution and tragedy is radiant and belligerently optimistic and reveals this scion of largely Hungarian forebears as the last great exponent of the style hongrois after Schubert, Liszt and Brahms.

Daniel Barenboim is an expert in exploiting the impact of cyclical performances of composers’ works: This time he focuses his sharp intellect on all six of Anton Bruckner’s mature symphonies. Der Tagesspiegel described Barenboim’s performance of the works with the Staatskapelle Berlin on six nearly consecutive evenings in June 2010 as a “superhuman” accomplishment and went on to praise how: “His Bruckner is conceived and performed very theatrically, like an opera without words.”Bruckner’s famous “Romantic” Symphony No. 4 forms the prelude to a spectacular DVD series from Accentus Music and Unitel Classica, exploring Bruckner’s symphonic cosmos.

This disc offers something quite hard to get these days - Beethoven and Schubert played for their own sake under a conductor who can and does wield from the rostrum every bit of the immense authority of the best years of his cello-playing when even the intervals between the notes seemed to have been imaginatively recreated, and the phrasing presented with nothing less than perfect sensitivity and dignity, and without any desire to make points or impress by virtuoso polish. Of course his approach is of his time. But the Marlboro audience was very lucky, and so is anyone who now listens to this with an open mind. This is a great musician conducting folk who in the act of performance he treats as equals.

That these symphonies are not more famous than they are simply amazes me. Prokofiev understood the nature of symphonic writing, and after the dainty cuteness of Symphony 1, he was ready to make his own mark. The Symphony 3 (1929) begins with a brash sense of alarm, then becomes quieter, more operatic in nature. And the composer's weird clashing harmonies are throughout the piece. Two versions of the Symphony 4 (1940) exist. This is the original version, which is shorter than the latter 1940 version. Neeme Järvi and the SNO have recorded the entire series for Chandos, and these are the ones to have.

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers. His best-known compositions include 9 symphonies, 5 piano concertos, 1 violin concerto, 32 piano sonatas, 16 string quartets, his great Mass the Missa solemnis, and one opera, Fidelio…

Otto Klemperer conducts Bruckner, Symphony No. 4. LP VOX recording with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra (Wiener Symphoniker), 1951. "LP pure" offers the true sound of the original recording without sonic "improvements".

« The four symphonies of Brahms form the kernel of our musical heritage, along with such works as the Monteverdi Vespers, the Bach Cello Suites and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées and the half-century (!) of Collegium Vocale Gent, we conceived the project of recording them in tandem with major choral works by this composer whose instrumental and vocal worlds are in essence inextricable. Johannes Brahms was at heart a singer.