This album offers two of the best known and most loved works by Leos Janacek. The Glagolitic Mass was thus described by a musicologist: "It has absolutely everything, it’s engrossing and enthralling and captivating and startling and soothing and primitive and pristine and incredibly spiritual".

Reviews:

A lean, cleanly contoured Glagolitic. Taras Bulba is generally well played.

– BBC Music Magazine

Janacek's signature dotted rhythms are somewhat rounded, smoothing out the usual angularity in this music. The strings play with a beautiful warm tone as opposed to the silvery glint of the Czech orchestras. The recording follows suit, with its warm tone.

– American Record Guide

Janowski takes an altogether gentler view of the work compared to the ebullient energy of Kubelik and in particular Mackerras. Not suprisingly, Janowski is at his most effective in the 'Agnece Bozij' (Agnus Dei); this is gracefully done. The extraordinary organ solo is well played.

– Gramophone

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

This selection is a Hybrid Multichannel Super Audio CD. The Stereo Hybrid SACD program can be played on any standard compact disc player. The DSD Surround and Stereo programs require an SACD player for playback.

If I were pressed, I would have to say that this series is the most consistent in an advanced-resolution format at providing excellent sound. Listen to the Beethoven piano concertos, for instance. The listener is placed in row ten, center, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra sounds rich, full, and focused. You sense immediately that you truly do have the best seat in the house. The solo piano enters and what a sound. It is like a magnificent, properly tuned piano! The overall sound is just right. And so it goes, with every release in this series. -- Rad Bennett, Radical Sounds

A welcome pairing of the two “second-string” Beethoven piano concertos in superb performances….Brent Town Hall in London was the recording site in 1974, and the phantom center image of the soloist couldn’t be better. -- John Sunier, Audiophile Audition

Mr Kovacevich was a killer interpreter of Beethoven back then, and Davis an ideal accomplice….Played with dispatch and recorded with a full-bodied sound that doesn’t lose its characters in the quietest moments, these are performances that will never grow stale. -- Dr. Phil Muse, Classik Reviews

If you don’t already have this recording in another format, it’s worth acquiring even if you don’t have an SACD player. It’s proof audibly that the best analog (and Philips were very good at it) was better than any digital until the present, and it is ironic that the SACD format shows off how good these masters were in the 70s. -- Andrew Marshall, Audio Ideas Guide

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Classical Music

Silk Baroque presents a musical encounter between Wu Wei and Holland Baroque, performing a programme that ranges from Baroque greats such as Bach, Vivaldi, Telemann and Rameau to Chinese traditional tunes, all tied together by the musicians’ openness to improvisation, experimentation and cultural exchange. Wu Wei plays the sheng, an extraordinary ancient Chinese mouth organ, which looks like a bundle of bamboo reeds cased in a metal bowl. It is a miracle of harmony, melody and rhythmic possibilities, and Wu Wei’s abilities fully bring out the sheng’s beauty: whispering, charming, and compelling.

Age-old traditions come together in performances that sound fresh and contemporary. Silk Baroque carries listeners into a lively, enticing and fascinating sound world. Holland Baroque is an original and innovative baroque orchestra that approaches baroque repertoire through a fresh and contemporary approach, with a focus on improvisation and collaborations with outstanding artists from different traditions. On their first PENTATONE release, they work together with Wu Wei, who dazzles audiences worldwide with his virtuosic sheng playing.

Premier si�cle; One Century of Music celebrates the centenary of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. The boxset contains a collection of rare radio recordings that have never been released before, spanning French, German, Russian and twentieth-century repertoire. A unique asset of Premier si�cle is the 1943 recording of the musical legend Les Armaillis (1906) by Swiss composer Gustave Doret. The album showcases the rich history and musical development of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and contain performances by all it's musical directors, from founding father Ernest Ansermet until current musical director Jonathan Nott, including all their intermediate colleagues: Paul Kletzki, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Horst Stein, Armin Jordan, Fabio Luisi, Pinchas Steinberg, Marek Janowski and Neeme J�rvi. The release comes with a voluminous, full-color booklet with texts on the orchestra's history and the repertoire presented in English, French and German as well as unique photos and archival materials.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Named for violinist Wouter Vossen’s 1794 Laorentius Storioni violin and founded in 1995, the Storioni Trio seems to be making its international recorded debut with this outstanding Beethoven coupling. To say that these performances impress more for their refinement than their intensity is not to imply that the playing is in any way underpowered or underinterpreted; the musicians simply aren’t obsessed with the extreme emotional tension that can be found among the likes of the highly admirable Beaux Arts and Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson trios. Consider merely the first movement of the early but by no means daintily Classical second trio. With unfailingly warm tone, the musicians make the contrast between the Adagio introduction and the faster main section matter through characterful playing rather than extreme tempo changes or big rhetorical gestures. There’s a wonderful lightness and cheer in play through much of this disc, and while, for example, the finale of the second trio benefits from the group’s precision and energy, such qualities never seem mechanical or forced.

All this holds true for the more popular “Ghost” Trio. Here, especially, pianist Bart van de Roer calls Joseph Kalichstein to mind insofar as he expertly puts his part across without letting Beethoven goad him into bullying his partners. Later, the musicians bring weight to the slow movement without putting a drag on the performance. This is a most impressive calling card for the Storioni Trio.

PentaTone’s sonics, as usual, are absolutely free of distortion, constriction, or glare in any format, but they are especially true-to-life in the 5.0 SACD layer.

James Reel, FANFARE

Maestro Marek Janowski leads a sensational cast — including star vocalists Lise Davidsen and Andreas Schager — on this new recording of Der Freischütz, the German Romantic opera par excellence. In the years after its 1821 premiere, the catchy melodies, picturesque charm and spooky scenes of Der Freischütz thrilled audiences throughout Europe. Janowski’s inspired reading lifts out the symphonic qualities of Carl Maria von Weber’s masterpiece, and makes clear why colleagues such as Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner raved about the work. The excellent cast consists of Lise Davidsen (Agathe), Andreas Schager (Max), Sofia Fomina (Ännchen), Alan Held (Kaspar), Markus Eiche (Ottokar) and Franz-Josef Selig (Eremit). Janowski conducts the Frankfurt Radio Symphony and MDR Radio Choir. For this recording, the original spoken dialogues have been replaced by short narrations, written by Katharina Wagner and Daniel Weber and recited by Corinna Kirchhoff and Peter Simonischeck. Marek Janowski is one of the most celebrated conductors of our times, and enjoys a vast PENTATONE discography, including complete recordings of Bruckner’s symphonies and Wagner’s mature operas. Frankfurt Radio Symphony has also released multiple albums on PENTATONE, including a recording of Richard Strauss’s Salome (2017).

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REVIEW:

Lise Davidsen gives her finest performance to date, with both her arias sung with a big, radiant voice, but always lyrically. She is well matched by Sofia Fomina’s perky Ännchen. Janowski conducts Weber’s masterly score with atmosphere and the choir are thrilling in the Huntsmen’s Chorus.

– Sunday Times (UK)

"Rachmaninov and Prokofiev are genius musical storytellers. Both have their own very personal and individual languages, and at the same time they are deeply rooted in the epic Russian tradition. When I immerse myself into their music, images of vast open spaces, Russian tales, folklore and even deft humor spring to mind. While the Prokofiev Sonata has been on my concert prgrams for many years, I came relatively recent to the music of Rachmaninov. I always felt this music needed the right partnership in order to work, the piano part being both tremendously demanding and poetic at the same time. Andrej for me, embodies all of those qualities, being a true champion of Rachmaninov's music. Embarking with him on this journey of core Russian repertoire has been so rewarding for me, and I am incredibly proud of our collaboration and the result you have on this new recording." - Johannes Moser "I met Johannes around two and a half years ago for a very special programme dedicated to the cello and piano repertory of the 20th century. We discovered that our ensemble is very equal so we discuss everything very openly. I really like that becasue for me it's not really interesting, for example, just to follow or when the soloist is following my ideas only. I've had such experiences before but here it's because you're working together, you create a new image together. And because we found the passion in each other's playing, we decided to do anothe rprogramme. I think this programme really fits us both perfectly. Rachmaninov and prokofiev, such Russian music! Amazing that both partst are so 'solo-tastic' but so much together. I thought, 'Yes, we should do it!'" - Andrei Korobeinikov

Whether it's a confident swagger or a balletic grace, a beguiling folk-melody or a quicksilver rondo, there is always something new to discover in the endlessly inventive symphonies of Haydn, especially in these firm favorites played by the Oregon Symphony under Carlos Kalmar in this new release. While Haydn wrote only one "surprise" symphony, there are surprises to be enjoyed aplenty here. From the bewildering Largo in Symphony No. 64 with its unexpected turns and derailments, to the ceremonial elegance and ear-tickling melodies of Symphony No. 53 or the mock-heroics and propulsive rhythms of Symphony No. 96, Haydn's irrepressible and dazzling ingenuity constantly delights and astonishes. "There is no one who can do it all," wrote Mozart, "to joke and to terrify, to evoke laughter and profound sentiment - and all equally well, except Joseph Haydn." This is Carlos Kalmar's fourth album for Pentatone with the Oregon Symphony. Their album Music for a Time of War, earned two Grammy nominations and was widely praised by music critics. Gramophone said of their album This England "Kalmar's Oregon performance certainly pulls no punches...a total success, gripping in mood and hot on specific instrumental detail," adding, "sound-wise, you couldn't ask fo rmore; nor could anyone expect finer recording from Pentatone." And in 2016, their critically acclaimed album of 20th century American orchestral works The Spirit of the American Range earned a Grammy nomination for Best Orchestral Performance. Carlos Kalmar, a Uruguayan national, is in his fourteenth season as Music Director of the Oregon Symphony. He is also the artistic director and principal conductor of the Grant Park Music Festival in Chicago. His Carnegie Hall debut in May, 2011 with the Oregon Symphony, was noted by New York critic Alex Ross as "one of the most gripping events of the current season".

With the Symphony No. 3, popularly referred to as the “Polish,” Mikhail Pletnev here completes his second cycle of the composer’s symphonies with the Russian National Orchestra. An earlier cycle dating from the 1990s with the same orchestra is still readily available on Deutsche Grammophon. Pletnev’s new cycle has much to recommend it. For starters, it’s all of a piece, by which I mean all six symphonies are performed by the same forces, for the same label (PentaTone), and they’re all in multichannel SACD format. As is true of most cycles, Pletnev’s is uneven. I raved about the conductor’s “Pathétique” in 35:3 and, having depleted my repertoire of adjectival superlatives on it, I was hard-pressed to express my even stronger endorsement of his “Little Russian” (No. 2) in 36:2. But my recommendations came with a caution that Pletnev’s approach to Tchaikovsky was super-charged and hyper-romantic.

Subjected to the scrutiny of others, not all of Pletnev’s releases in this new cycle have received unstinting praise. Colleague Boyd Pomeroy wondered if the conductor’s Fourth wasn’t too refined in a Karajanesque manner, while Peter J. Rabinowitz generally approved of Pletnev’s Fifth but noted some balance problems and a trace of the old Soviet vibrato. And even yours truly, after waxing ecstatic over Pletnev’s “Pathétique,” was not entirely convinced by the conductor’s follow-up “Winter Daydreams” (No. 1) in 35:6.

With this No. 3, we have the final curtain call for Pletnev’s PentaTone cycle and, as cycles go, I’d have to give this one an overall outstanding rating. Personally, I can’t get too excited about Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony. As I said in my review of Pletnev’s Second, between the Second and Third, it’s a tossup as to which is the weakest of Tchaikovsky’s six numbered symphonies. The Third Symphony was composed in fairly short order between June and August 1875, and there’s little evidence that Tchaikovsky fretted over it or kept tweaking it as he did with his First Symphony. For the neurotic and generally insecure composer, it seems that he was satisfied with the completed score and called it done. His only complaint was that the first performance could have gone better had there been more rehearsals. The work is unique among Tchaikovsky’s symphonies in that it’s the only one in five movements, and, unless one counts the composer’s abandoned Seventh Symphony in E?-Major, it’s the only one among the standard six that’s in a major key. It seems I’m not alone in my opinion of the work. Critical commentary has been mixed at best. Musicologist David Brown rated the Third, “the most inconsistent and least satisfactory of the symphonies and badly flawed” ( Tchaikovsky: The Crisis Years, 1874–1878 , and Tchaikovsky: The Final Years, 1855–1893 ). And to that I would add the least consequential.

If the score is one you find appealing, I can think of no better proponent of it than Pletnev. As with all previous releases in this cycle, Pletnev has the Russian National Orchestra playing in top form, and he finds many felicities in the piece, like the coquettish wind asides in the Alla tedesca movement that delight the ear and give Tchaikovsky’s note-spinning a serenade-like gracefulness.

The Coronation March that fills out the disc—or, to give its full title, Festival Coronation March —is one of those potboiler pieces composers are often called upon to provide for political events or ceremonies of state. In this case, the ceremony was the coronation of Tsar Alexander III in 1883. Tchaikovsky received the commission to write the piece from Moscow’s mayor—it was more of an order than it was an offer—while he was in Paris working on his opera Mazeppa , and he was royally roiled, writing to Nadezhda von Meck, “My plans have been upset by two unexpected and very burdensome tasks foisted upon me. The city of Moscow has commissioned from me a ceremonial march to be played at the festivities which are to be organized for the Sovereign at the Sokol’nikii. Hardly had I managed to reconcile myself to the thought that I must tear myself away from the opera for the march, when suddenly I received a letter from the festival committee about a cantata. Both works, especially the cantata, have to be ready very soon, a prospect which fills me with dread.” If he’d put as much time and effort into working on the assignments as he did kvetching to von Meck about them, he might have produced something more worthy of his reputation. Still, in the end, Tchaikovsky seems to have thought highly enough of his march to make a piano transcription of it. Shades of the 1812 Overture come to mind, but without the cannon, carillon, or La Marseillaise , and all condensed down to less than seven minutes. It’s not very good, but at least it’s loud.

FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Desire. Brutality. Lust. Slyness. Anxiety. What a fascinatingly menacing thematic melange is seething in this Salome. Richard Strauss, the “nervous contrapuntalist,” had immediately recognized the potential of Oscar Wilde’s play, and had proceeded to add to it a musical meta-plane, which resulted in Salome becoming the scandalous new point of departure for opera in the 20th century. In its vivid psychological depiction of a corrupt world, Salome is, at the same time, both child of and witness to the dawning of the 20th century – a reflection of a moribund late-bourgeois era, captivated by its own putrefaction. The opera hit the nerve of the times. Strauss poured the Salome catastrophe into a one-act opera lasting a mere 100 minutes. However, these are 100 highly condensed minutes, which demand the listener’s full and uninterrupted attention without any break; first torturing him emotionally and then trickling the venom of sweet, seductive music into his ears and mind; laying his nerves bare, then making him tremble in aroused expectation. The new Pentatone album featuring the young, up-and-coming conductor Andres Orozco-Estrada leading the hr Symphony Orchestra (formerly Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra) is a live recording of a concert given on September 10, 2016 in Frankfurt.

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REVIEW:

Orozco-Estrada’s approach is unrushed and often expansive. Magee’s Salome spits out her words as part of a characterization of the Judean princess that’s compellingly real and convincing. An unusually persuasive aural drama and a deeply musical account of the score – a compelling listen featuring a fine cast and expertly conducted. It’s a set that can be warmly recommended.

– Gramophone

This SACD contains Joseph Haydn’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in C major and his Sinfonia Concertante in B flat major. The pieces are performed by one of the 20th century’s leading violinists, Pinchas Zukerman, former Principal Cellist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Ronald Leonhard, oboist Barbara Winters and bassoonist David Breidenthal, together with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. These are outstanding performances of often neglected repertoire by the great Classical master, finally realised in the finest sound quality.

Classical Music

Belgian clarinettist Annelien Van Wauwe revives the golden glow of a bygone age on her PENTATONE debut album Belle époque, together with the Orchestre National de Lille and its music director Alexandre Bloch. The programme is built around treasures of French turn-of-the-century music such as Debussy’s Première Rhapsodie, Pierné’s Canzonetta and Widor’s Introduction et Rondo (the latter two in arrangements by Jelle Tassyns). Belle époque also offers works that display a spiritual kinship to the age, such as Brahms’s first clarinet sonata, arranged by Luciano Berio, and a world-premiere recording of Paris-based contemporary composer Manfred Trojahn (Rhapsodie pour clarinette et orchestre). Annelien van Wauwe is a former BBC New Generation Artist and winner of the renowned Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award 2018. She kickstarts an exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE with this first solo album. The Orchestre National de Lille and Alexandre Bloch release their second PENTATONE album, after their 2018 recording of Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de perles, crowned with a Diapason d’or.

Acclaimed for their adventurous and wide-ranging recording projects – from Beethoven Sonatas on period instruments to genre-bending arrangements of Radiohead and Arcade Fire – the endlessly inventive duo of cellist Matt Haimovitz and pianist Christopher O’Riley returns to explore music of the Slavic soul. Anchored by the cello sonatas of the iconic triumvirate of Russian composers –Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich – and inspired by the subversive irony of Shostakovich’s Sonata, TROIKA also delves into more recently-written, unexpected, and popular works. Whether subtle or blatantly rebellious, each work potently reveals the strength of the artistic voice in the face of political repression in mother Russia.

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REVIEW:

Haimovitz and O’Riley really go to town—specifically, Moscow. The ‘Troika’ of their stylishly presented double-disc set comprises the three cello sonatas by Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev, as well as a dizzying transcription of the eponymous lollipop from Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé—one of a series of spectacular virtuoso transcriptions that range from Shostakovich’s now ubiquitous Waltz No 2 to explosive versions of songs by Pussy Riot and The Beatles (‘Back in the USSR’, naturally).

Apparently there’s a political thesis behind these choices, but what really speaks is Haimovitz and O’Riley’s playing in the three sonatas. These are emotionally charged readings on the grandest scale. Haimovitz in particular plays with an articulate, vibrato-rich tone that he can refine down to an almost viola-like mellowness in, say, the Andante of the Rachmaninov, or send soaring and swooping (no shortage of portamento here) round O’Riley’s mountains of piano sound.

– Gramophone

Orbit, a three-disc compilation of music for solo cello, all composed between 1945 and 2014 and performed by world-renowned cellist Matt Haimovitz, is the second release in the PENTATONE OXINGALE SERIES. In this series PENTATONE joins forces with Grammy Award-winning OXINGALE RECORDS, a trailblazing artist’s label since 2000 which is equally committed to revelatory interpretations of the canonic repertoire as to riveting performances of works by recent and living composers.

The album documents Matt Haimovitz’s musical journey since the turn of the millennium, together with his partner in life and music, composer Luna Pearl Woolf. It contains nearly all of the solo contemporary works that were initially released on Oxingale Records as five thematic albums - Anthem (2003), Goulash! (2005), After Reading Shakespeare (2007), Figment (2009) and Matteo (2011), as well as two newly recorded tracks: Philip Glass’s “Orbit” and a new arrangement by Luna Pearl Woolf of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter”. More than twenty composers are represented in this set, fifteen of them still living, and ten works are recorded for the very first time.

This impressive solo cello odyssey offers the listener a fascinating kaleidoscope of musical influences from the past sixty years, encountering a variety of composers who range in musical style from vanguards Elliott Carter and Philip Glass to young, rock ‘n roll-influenced American composers, to the Italian avant-garde of Luciano Berio and Salvatore Sciarrino: a true 20th century Tower of Babel.

Renowned Schubert interpreter Ian Bostridge revisits Winterreise, the greatest of all song cycles, on his first PENTATONE album. Bostridge presents this masterpiece together with pianist, conductor and composer Thomas Adès, who bases his profound accompaniment on a fresh engagement with the original manuscripts. Winterreise is the epitome of Romantic melancholia, written by a composer aware of his fatal illness but at the height of his creative powers. It is the first installment of a trilogy of PENTATONE recordings comprising the major Schubert song cycles. After Winterreise, Die schöne Müllerin and Schwanengesang will follow. Ian Bostridge is one of the most celebrated tenors and lied interpreters of his generation. Thomas Adès is best known as a composer but demonstrates his extraordinary skills as a song accompanist on his first PENTATONE recording.

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REVIEW:

In the first song, Gute Nacht, you notice right off how Bostridge’s dynamics are subtly chosen and applied, his sense for drama very sensitive to the emotional flow of the music and text, and how his diction is very clear here and throughout. Adès plays with the appropriate somberness and an emphatic manner, his accenting and dynamics quite effective in conveying a feeling of sadness and emerging desperation.

– MusicWeb International

In their astounding new opera The (R)evolution of Steve Job, composer Mason Bates and librettist Mark Campbell explore the spiritual evolution of one of the most influential men of modern times as he creates a revolutionary new world of technological empowerment, then discovers a larger world within himself. Like Steve Jobs, composer Mason Bates is an innovator whose creativity breaks through boundaries, combining traditional orchestration with electronics in ways that have made him one of the most sought-after and widely programmed composers in the United States. In The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, Bates and Campbell give us an alternative and intimate perspective of a public life, examining the people and experiences that shaped Steve Jobs: his father, his Buddhist practice, his rise and fall as an executive, and finally his marriage to the woman who showed him the power of human connection.

Although the timings for this recording are about as typical as one will find, the performance is distinctive. Russian-born and American-trained conductor Jakov Kreizberg gives us a rather subdued first movement, beautifully paced and carefully balanced, with the Vienna Symphony drawing close to its senior rival, the Philharmonic, in the beauty of its playing. The mood becomes downright solemn in the Adagio, the most important movement in this symphony. The first subject is funereal, suggesting that Kreizberg recalls that Bruckner intended it as a memorial to Richard Wagner, seriously ill when the composer began his work on it, and deceased before its completion. The contrasting second subject, which can be played as a cheerful contrast, here maintains the original air of seriousness, while realizing in unusually high degree Bruckner’s splendid part-writing in the strings. The build-up to the movement’s climax is unhurried, making the outburst of the full orchestra, complete with crashing cymbals and thunderous drums, even more effective than usual. The long coda comes across as the lamentation Bruckner intended.

Kreizberg then demonstrates that this symphony, unlike several by the composer, changes from solemnity to robust affirmation in its two shorter and concluding movements. After a fast and boisterous Scherzo, we hear a suitably Haydnesque finale, full of playfulness and affirmation. In sum, this is a first-rate Bruckner Seventh, sounding very good in stereo and even better in multichannel SACD mode. Its measured pacing in the first two movements, along with the use of modern instruments, make it a quite different affair from the recent and highly praised Herreweghe recording for Harmonia Mundi, also available as an SACD, with its original instruments and brisk tempos. More dramatic recordings exist, to be sure: one thinks of several deceased masters—to name a few, Eugen Jochum, Günter Wand, Georg Tintner, Hans Knappertsbusch, Kurt Eichhorn, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer, and Kurt Sanderling. But Kreizberg’s thoughtful and superbly executed interpretation deserves a wide hearing.

Robert McColley, FANFARE

Classical Music

This selection is a Hybrid Multichannel Super Audio CD. The Stereo Hybrid SACD program can be played on any standard compact disc player. The DSD Surround and Stereo programs require an SACD player for playback.

At long last, Franz Schmidt’s magnificent Fourth Symphony is becoming a staple of the CD catalog, if not the concert hall. The mournful, nostalgic, yearning score, an elegy for a dead daughter and a dying culture (Vienna, 1934), is one of the last great gestures of the Romantic era. It’s Strauss without the bombast, Mahler without the neuroses. This 45-minute dirge received only one recording during the mono era, and then only one pre-digital stereo treatment—one of its best versions, by Zubin Mehta and the Vienna Philharmonic. That Decca recording, from about 1971, remains one of the finest things Mehta has ever done. I don’t mean that to sound like damning with faint praise; Mehta is far from my favorite conductor, but with this score and the Vienna Philharmonic he drew on emotional resources that would elude him later in his career. For its balance of sorrow, anguish, and uneasy peace, the Mehta recording has never quite been bettered. L’udovít Rajter and the Bratislava Radio Orchestra made the symphony’s first digital recording, in 1987, as part of an Opus cycle that produced the first decent versions of Schmidt’s first two symphonies (they and the Third are much sunnier works than the Fourth). Rajter’s Fourth was honorable, but was no longer necessary when Mehta finally appeared on CD and other better-played versions came along. Those latter include Franz Welser-Möst and the London Philharmonic (EMI, 1994), followed within a couple of years by Martin Sieghart and the Bruckner Orchestra of Linz (Chesky) and Neeme Järvi and the Detroit Symphony (Chandos). Members of the London Philharmonic nicknamed Welser-Möst “Frankly Worse than Most,” which is surely an overstatement, although in this lineup he’s better only than Rajter; even so, his disc is valuable for its inclusion of Schmidt’s Variations on a Hussar’s Song, otherwise available only on a hard-to-find Preiser CD. Sieghart is surprisingly competitive, perhaps edging out Järvi to come in a close second to Mehta.

Now, just at the dawn of the SACD era, we already have a first-rate new version of Schmidt’s Fourth in superb surround sound from Yakov Kreizberg and the Netherlands Philharmonic on PentaTone. The recorded sound is a bit distant, but detailed (clear enough to reveal an occasional grunt from the podium). More important, Kreizberg’s performance breathes nicely, with a natural rubato that makes its effect over large musical paragraphs more than through individual phrases. It isn’t quite my Schmidt ideal; the big climax about six minutes into the Molto vivace, which is effectively the third movement, could be marginally more cataclysmic. (An aside: The chorale just after this point would have been a better place than three minutes from the end to begin track 4, since the chorale introduces what is essentially the symphony’s recapitulation if you regard the work as one massive sonata-allegro movement.) Also, Kreizberg could have wrung more passion out of the little climax about two-and-a-half minutes from the end, the symphony’s last cry before it dies away into the bereft trumpet solo with which it began. But these are small points, and Kreizberg joins Sieghart just marginally behind Mehta.

Perhaps tipping the judgment to Kreizberg, besides the modern five-channel sound (the CD can also be played in two-channel stereo on a regular player), is the inclusion of three orchestral bits from Schmidt’s opera Notre Dame (as in the Victor Hugo novel known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame). The lush, string-centered, harp-haloed Intermezzo has been recorded many times before, most notably in a voluptuous, daringly slow Karajan version on EMI, but the Introduction and “Carnival Music” are comparative rarities. I’ve encountered these three pieces together as a suite only on an Opus/Musical Heritage Society LP by Rajter and the Slovak Philharmonic, where the music was inexactly billed as “Carnival and Intermezzo.” The suite is a welcome addition to this disc, but it should have come first rather than last; Schmidt’s devastating Symphony No. 4 should be followed only by silence.

James Reel, FANFARE

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Mikhail Pletnev remains a cypher. Remember how rapturously his first major recording as a conductor, Tchaikovsky's Sixth on Virgin, was greeted? Then he went on to do all the symphonies for DG, and the result was the dullest cycle in history. His Beethoven, on the other hand, was simply perverse: not interestingly perverse, but stupidly perverse. Of course this didn't stop equally stupidly perverse critics from praising it, but that's another story altogether.

Now he turns in a very fine Shostakovich 15th. It has something of the balletic grace that made his initial Pathétique so attractive. The lyrical passages in the second movement and the main theme of the finale have a poised beauty that really is quite striking. Similarly, his light textures in the first movement's "toy" music, as well as the scherzo, tickle the ear and keep the music buoyant.

There is a price, of course, in terms of sharpness of focus and power at the climaxes, not to mention emotional intensity. The xylophone and whip don't cut as they might, and the Wagner quotations in the finale lack a certain atmosphere, but the otherworldly textural clarity that Pletnev achieves in the movement's central passacaglia remains very special. In fact, his relative coolness suits this "spacey" music particularly well.

The coupled Hamlet excerpts do not come from the more familiar film score, but comprise a suite taken from the much earlier incidental music. It's typical youthful Shostakovich: pithy, bright, angular, and lots of fun. It requires little beyond sprightly tempos and a literal reading of the notes to make a fine impression, and that's just what the music receives here. PentaTone's sonics are, like the performance, clear, well-balanced, and a touch lacking in body, whether in stereo or multichannel surround formats. A very recommendable disc.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com