4 SYMPHONIES • Thomas Dausgaard, cond; Danish Natl SO • C MAJOR 710508 (DVD: 168:00) Live: Copenhagen 2009

BRAHMS Symphony No. 1. DVO?ÁK Symphony No. 9. SIBELIUS Symphony No. 5. NIELSEN Symphony No. 3

If, as I did, you were to begin your examination of this release with disc 1, track 1 (the Brahms symphony), you might well conclude that there was little need to continue. There is something rather too cool and casual about Dausgaard’s interpretation of this powerful music. It lacks inner tension. There is not enough contrast between ideas. Accents are in the wrong places. Short notes are cheated of their value. And that’s not all. The second movement just plods on, the third is charmless, the fourth frantic and lurches from one tempo change to the next. Listening to the complete symphony several times could not induce me to alter my initial unfavorable observations. Adding visual insult to aural injury, sight and sound are not synchronized, and the difference between the two is disturbing, to put it mildly.

But then came the Nielsen symphony. What a difference! Right from the opening moments it had all the vigor and élan and determination lacking in the Brahms. Rhythms were tight and crisp. The music bristled with enthusiasm and commitment. The finale positively beamed with Elgarian nobility and breadth, rising to an absolutely thrilling climax. What a joy! Nielsen’s Third had hitherto never been one of my favorite symphonies, but Dausgaard nearly made it so in this performance.

Does Dausgaard work his magic on the two remaining works as well? The answer, I’m glad to say, is yes. Furthermore, the synchronization problem that affected the Brahms symphony is only minimal in the Nielsen and nonexistent in Dvo?ák and Sibelius. The “New World” Symphony receives one of the finest performances I have heard. Dausgaard’s approach is no romantic wallow but rather a clean, purposeful traversal filled with taut rhythms, precise attacks and releases, glowing sound, and architectural strength. Dausgaard likewise makes a strong case for the Sibelius Fifth, never allowing momentum to sag, carefully propelling the music forward with masterly control. I am particularly impressed with the ease in which he handles the tempo change for the second part of the first movement. By the time the grand climax of the finale arrives, one feels a great journey has been completed.

All four performances were recorded live in Copenhagen’s Koncerthuset in 2009. The personnel changes from symphony to symphony, but both principal horns, both principal trumpets, and both timpanists are star players. Generally the woodwinds are excellent, but violins seem a bit thin for an orchestra that is otherwise so assured and well balanced. However, the basses make up for this deficiency with their huge, rich sound, heard at its best at the quiet endings of three of the Brahms movements and in some of the more powerful moments of the Dvo?ák symphony. Aside from the basses, the orchestra plays with a bright sound, textures are clear and clean, balances are well controlled.

The camerawork is devoted about 20 percent of the time to Dausgaard and his facial contortions, 10 percent to views of the full orchestra from afar, and 70 percent to the business of jerking the viewer’s eyes from one instrumental close-up to another—two seconds of a horn player’s embouchure, a second of flute keys, two notes from the timpani, etc. Who determined that this is what we want to see? I find it annoying to the point where I simply can’t bear to watch.

On ArkivMusic the price for these four symphonies is $27 ($40 for the Blu-ray version)—just under $7 a symphony, a good buy even without the inferior Brahms symphony, especially for performances as fine as the other three.

FANFARE: Robert Markow

This album is a reissue of the Chandos label's 1988 recording of Dvorák’s Cello Concerto in B minor and the Konzertstück for Cello and Orchestra by Dohnányi, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Charles Mackerras, with Raphael Wallfisch the featured soloist.

The Cello Concerto in B minor by Dvorák has become one of his most popular works, and perhaps the most popular concerto ever written for the instrument. He was asked to write this piece by a friend of Wagner, the cellist Hanuš Wihan. Initially reluctant, Dvorák stated that the cello was indeed a fine orchestral instrument but totally insufficient for a solo concerto. Fortunately, he changed his mind upon hearing Victor Herbert’s Second Cello Concerto performed in concert, in 1894. The resulting Cello Concerto is richly inventive, full of deep feeling, and perfectly fitted to the cello. Dvorák combined his experience as an orchestral player with an understanding of the cello’s distinct textural qualities to produce a grand and emotionally intense work, one of his finest achievements.

Ernst von Dohnányi was highly acclaimed as a pianist-composer, and widely regarded during his lifetime as a successor to Liszt. As a composer, however, he had more in common with Brahms than with Liszt, despite his Hungarian heritage, and his creative output was not limited to the piano. His Konzertstück in D major is in fact a full-scale cello concerto, in three interconnected parts. A lyrical rhapsody, it begins quietly, the cello emerging out of the orchestra and seeming to sing, until parting with a sense of regret at the end.

Recorded in: St Jude on the Hill, Hampstead, London 4-5 July 1988 Producer(s) Brian Couzens Sound Engineer(s) Ralph Couzens Janet Middlebrook (Assistant)

You might subtitle this disc “The Dark Dvorák” since it consists of three of his most turbulent (but also greatest) works. First there’s Othello: guy kills girl. Next, The Wood Dove: girl kills guy, then offs herself. Finally, there’s the tragic Seventh Symphony: everyone kills everyone, but metaphorically, of course. I actually love the concept. Usually, Dvorák gets treated as a sort of “Brahms lite”, a cute Bohemian purveyor of alluring, pastoral tunes full of charm and ethnic high spirits. Even the frequent use of minor keys can be explained by his frequent recourse to Czech folksongs, dances, and other equally adorable (and non-threatening) accoutrements of his native land.

Claus Peter Flor is obviously having none of it. Not only has he chosen three of Dvorák’s most impassioned works, he plays them so as to make damn sure that we feel the same way about them that he does. First the really good news: both Othello and The Wood Dove are stunning. Indeed, this is hands down the most exciting performance of the former yet committed to disc, bar none. Hearing this performance, you will be stunned that this thrilling, dramatic work remains one of the most neglected of all Dvorák’s late masterpieces. The Wood Dove is every bit as brilliant: gaunt and grim in the funeral march that brackets the lilting wedding scene, and crushing in the subsequent suicide music. One curiosity: Flor prefers the kazoo-like sound of muted trumpets to Dvorák’s requested instruments offstage just before the party sequence—an odd choice.

The performance of the Seventh Symphony will be more controversial. It has magnificent moments—indeed whole movements. The Andante receives as lovingly shaped a reading as any on disc, but there are moments when Flor’s eagerness to underline the music’s darkness leads him dangerously close to mannerism. I’m thinking of the first movement’s opening (and coda), treated more as a slow introduction than as the plunge into the main tempo that Dvorák wrote. As a postlude, the tempo makes more sense. The scherzo, too, is swift and urgent, but somehow just slightly lacking in rhythmic bite, while the finale, played for all that it’s worth, does not benefit from Flor’s decision near the start to hold back the tempo at the ends of phrases to underscore just how grim the music is supposed to be.

Once the movement gets going, though, Flor builds in excitement right through to an incredibly powerful coda. He adds horns to the final chorale, as so many performances do, but Neumann’s trumpets avoid that slightly vulgar portamento that always seems to accompany the horn option, and their brighter tone is arguably more apt. And why, finally, does Flor have the timpani drop out on the final chord? That’s just weird. Is he afraid that a more emphatic ending might persuade us that the work isn’t as despairing as he believes it to be?

It may be that the engineering exacerbates some of these impressions. Don’t get me wrong: the basic sound is very good in and of itself, but in this music, especially, we need to hear more from the woodwinds, and a sharper rhythmic bite from the brass and timpani. These are subtle points, but listeners familiar with this music will notice immediately the difference between these and other, more brightly engineered versions. And make no mistake: a brighter mean sonority can be captured without compromising the music’s expressive intensity, its “dark” energy.

So to summarize: the commitment and vision on evidence here are extremely impressive. Even the symphony, for all my various reservations, receives a performance like no other, magnificent in parts, impressive overall, and one that collectors will surely want to hear. Flor has the orchestra playing extremely well, and unlike so many time-beaters taking up podium space these days he has both good ideas and the talent to execute them. He takes risks. Whether or not they all pay off will be a matter of opinion, but there’s no question that when they do the result is the most gripping Dvorák to come along in many years.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

This new DVD preserves some superb performances directed by a conductor of the highest calibre, performing live and at the peak of his abilities.



STRAUSS Ein Heldenleben 1. DVO?ÁK Symphony No. 9, “From the New World 2” • Rudolf Kempe, cond; 1 Royal PO; 2 BBC SO • ICA 5009, mono (DVD: 89:22) Live: Royal Albert Hall, London 1 8/28/1974; 2 8/29/1975


How absolutely wonderful it is to see Rudolf Kempe, looking hale and fit, ascend the podium and direct an absolutely magical performance of Ein Heldenleben with his usual minimum of podium fuss, his face mirroring both the music’s changes and his obvious pleasure at hearing it emerge the way he wants, the Royal Philharmonic members playing their little hearts out for him. This is exactly the way I always imagined Kempe in performance, as close to Toscanini’s podium style as any conductor who outlived him, eliciting that magical, transparent sound, ignoring nothing in rhythmic acuity and liveliness, and now we have the pleasure of seeing how he did it.


The sound is still mono but the images are in color. The members of the orchestra look completely rapt in concentration; everything in this performance is focused on the music, nothing on how they look to the audience. A bit dull to watch? Perhaps. But, like watching such similar conductors as Toscanini, Doráti, and Böhm, it amazes one that such exuberance of spirit and a rich palette of colors can emanate from such outward calm and control. For make no mistake, Kempe was a master of coloration. He knew how to make an orchestra “speak.” He knew the secret, now lost to a modern generation of conductors, of how to play music like this so that it sounded not only beautiful but noble, eschewing bombast in favor of the long line, the gradual ebb and flow of suspense, and—I reiterate—that unbelievable palette of colors he had at his disposal. Kempe’s strings had the sound of a choir singing.


In my experience there was only one performance of Ein Heldenleben I really loved prior to hearing this performance, and that was Willem Mengelberg’s 1941 broadcast with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. The Concertgebouw of that time was by no means the technically precise instrument that the New York Philharmonic of 1928 was, in his Victor recording, but there is so much more detail and drama in the later performance that I forgave the roughly played passages. Kempe’s Heldenleben is an entirely different animal. The contrasts are all musical, not as dramatic, but with a flow and coloristic quality that make the score sound more akin to the upward spiral of ascending angels than to Mengelberg’s explosive reading (though they join hands in “The Hero’s Deeds of War”). There is nothing like it in my experience, not even Kempe’s studio recording for EMI, because the studio recording adds the goop of mid 1960s reverb to a performance that doesn’t need it. Here we have, if you will, Kempe urtext, and the result is simply mind-boggling. Listen, for instance, to the way he makes the low bass passage resound with great depth without sounding heavy or ponderous. His legato flow is seamless, the accuracy and crispness of his attacks and releases flawless. It was exactly moments like these that took your breath away when listening to a Kempe performance.


Yet he resented EMI’s pushing him as a Wagner and Strauss specialist. Kempe conducted a great deal more than that, Schubert, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Dvo?ák, Shostakovich, and Bruckner among them, and all of them well (he’s one of the few conductors besides Furtwängler who, to me, made some sense of Bruckner’s succession of endings in his symphonies), and here he follows Heldenleben with the “New World” Symphony of Dvo?ák. Unexpectedly, his performance of this symphony is startlingly dramatic, having almost the punch and drama of Toscanini’s excellent 1953 recording, only with Kempe’s patented transparency. The orchestra swells and ebbs flawlessly and naturally under his guiding hands; an unexpected rubato after the brief flute solo is picked up with tremendous force when the brass and high strings erupt again. Dozens of little details—clipped rhythmic accents here, buoyant legato bridges there—mark this interpretation as unique.


Kempe uses a fairly small baton, even a little smaller than Toscanini’s but not as tiny as the toothpicks that Strauss and Reiner used. His arms are a little further apart than Toscanini’s, but he is only slightly more animated on the podium, his arms moving in graceful arcs. Only a few months after the Dvo?ák performance came the shocking announcement that Kempe had died. I can remember that moment as if it were yesterday; it grieved me more than you can imagine. He had a very special gift, sought by many but bestowed on few, and we are all the poorer for his untimely passing.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley


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In a letter to his friend, the distinguished French man of letters Romain Rolland, Richard Strauss categorically denied that he was the model for Ein Heldenleben: “I am not a hero. I have not got the necessary strength; I am not cut out for battle; I prefer to withdraw, to be quiet, to have peace.”

Some commentators may have refused to take Strauss at his word, but the uncredited director of this BBC transmission of a 1974 Proms concert is clearly not among them. His view of things is crystal clear for, throughout the whole of the work’s first section, a musical depiction of Der Held (The Hero), he resolutely directs his cameras at the conductor. There is, in fact, not a single second of that opening 4:59 of music when Rudolf Kempe is not pictured on-screen, whether in close-up, middle distance or in long-shot. The corollary of that fact is that as soon as we begin the work’s second section, Des Helden Widersacher (The Hero’s Adversaries), we start to see the orchestra members on their own – but maybe I am now stretching my theory of the supposed relationship between the visual images and the “text” just a little too far.

Even though Kempe’s widow Cordula records in the DVD booklet notes that her husband “thoroughly resented” being pigeonholed as a Strauss (and Wagner) specialist, his affinity with Strauss’s music was well recognised at the time. His record company EMI persuaded him to set down the complete orchestral works on disc. No less a personage than the Queen Mother reportedly gushed “Oh, Mr Kempe, when will you do the Alpine Symphony again?” (rather a surprise, given recent revelations of the sort of music she listened to at home). And, as evidenced in this performance taken from the conductor’s very last concert with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the 1974 Promenaders were quite over the moon with this Ein Heldenleben; critic Joan Chissell reported that this performance elicited “a hero’s ovation and rightly”.

Having never seen Kempe conduct live or on film before, the first thing that struck me was just how physically charismatic and animated he was on the podium. By fastidious, very precise gestures with both his baton and the fingers of his left hand, he coaxes some exquisite sonorities that we can fully appreciate thanks to his scrupulous care for orchestral balance - and to the installation of fibre-glass acoustic diffusing discs on the Royal Albert Hall’s ceiling just five years earlier, successfully reducing its notorious echo.

The outstanding characteristic of Kempe’s interpretation is that, by the application of both sensitivity and sensibility, he gives Strauss’s score the opportunity to breathe. This is, indeed, anything but a brash, bombastic account: the orchestra plays with notable and carefully controlled intensity and Erich Gruenberg’s substantial violin solos are especially affecting - he justifiably gets a special roar of approval from the Promenaders as he takes his bow.

If the Strauss is very fine indeed, the Dvorák is, however, outstanding. Edward Greenfield’s booklet notes suggest that its distinguishing feature is the wide range of dynamics that Kempe applies. What struck me most, however, was the interpretation itself. In contrast to performances that emphasise the score’s elements of cheery Bohemian bonhomie, Kempe’s is a deeply serious account.

The opening movement is characterised by fierce attack and precision - wonderful playing from the BBC orchestra - and Kempe minimises the elements of lyricism in favour high drama. In a similar vein, the second movement’s sentimentality is entirely played down. Its well-known “big tune” ( Goin’ home, Goin’ home, I’m a goin’ home / Quiet like, still some day, I’m just goin’ home) is moved purposefully along and the fervent manner in which its central section is played communicates, to this listener at least, a distinctly uneasy feeling of agitation and unrest.

Kempe’s interpretation is nothing if not consistently of a piece for the scherzo and the allegro con fuoco finale are similarly driven powerfully forward. The formers elements of bucolic rusticism are given short shrift and the latter, right from its opening bars, emerges as a real daredevil ride and is terribly exciting - while still very skilfully controlled and crafted.

This New World is one that emerges as a real eye-opener and a very different work from the one that we’re usually presented with. It justifiably receives a huge ovation from the audience.

This new DVD, then, preserves some superb performances. The direction – originally for BBC TV - is expert and thus almost entirely unobtrusive, the visual image - in colour throughout - is sharp and pleasing and the sound is more than acceptable. It offers an opportunity to acquaint or reacquaint oneself with a conductor of the highest calibre, performing live and at the peak of his abilities.

-- Rob Maynard, MusicWeb International

This is an audio-only (i.e., with no video content) Blu-ray disc playable only on Blu-ray players.

In these recordings from Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore, Dvo?ák’s most darkly dramatic and passionate symphony, the Seventh, is coupled with his Eighth, notable for its dramatic contrasts, Bohemian lyricism, and a seemingly spontaneous flow of thematic ideas. ‘Alsop’s Baltimore orchestra parades a refined tonal profile that pays its own special dividends…Alsop should please both the eager newcomer…and the seasoned collector. There’ll be no disappointment on either score.’ (Gramophone) ‘This splendidly recorded performance [Symphony No. 7] stands very high among available readings.’ (BBC Music Magazine)

Sound format: PCM Stereo / DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1

Mackerras unseated? This magical version from Australia comes close

Chandos certainly has guts, going toe-to-toe with Mackerras’s Gramophone Award-winning set. Hickox’s Australian forces need not fear the comparison. Cheryl Barker may not have the refulgent tones of Renée Fleming on Decca (who has?) but she is even more moving in conveying Rusalka’s desperation. Mackerras is still my must-own, but this runs it close.

-- Gramophone [3/2008]