Classical Court

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on December 15, 2024 at 01:14:18

This final group of faves leans heavily on recordings produced by individual orchestras themselves. Some of these are "Apple Exclusives" and may not be available to all listeners - at least for awhile. In fact, even the news that certain albums of this type have been released may not reach the potentially interested public, unless they're subscribers to Apple Music - a strange situation indeed.

San Francisco Symphony

With the resignation of Esa Pekka Salonen as the San Francisco Symphony's music director (effective the end of this season IIRC), it remains to be seen how much more there will be coming in the way of recordings in the near future from this source. Too bad, because Salonen and the SFS have released some truly excellent recordings over the past two years. Their releases for 2024 included:

DA. There are of course zillions of great recordings of "The Firebird", including a 1989 release by Salonen himself (with the Philharmonia Orchestra on CBS). But this one is certainly among the upper echelon of performances when it comes to impact and dazzling playing - partly because I suspect that Salonen is in his prime right now. Sure, I've seen all the microphones they use for these in-concert recordings - but with Dolby Atmos, the holism illusion is maintained and the listener becomes aware only of the totality and the music's emotional evocations. Fantastic!

DA. And, speaking of "fantastic". . . this recording was totally unexpected! No nordic, icy rendition here, but rather a seat-of-the-pants wild ride through Berlioz' lurid soundscape! (As Bernstein used to say about this Symphony, "Berlioz takes a trip!".) It almost evokes the kind of delirium we've treasured in the old Paray and Munch recordings from over sixty years ago! Having said that however, I happened to be driving the other day and caught a performance of the Sf on the radio, which seemed similarly impressive to this new Salonen/SF Symphony recording - very excitable and forward moving. Well, it WAS the SF Symphony, but with MTT conducting, not Esa Pekka. So the orchestra was already prepared for this kind of interpretation from MTT's performances and recording, and Salonen just had to add his own touches to what was, in general, already in line with his own interpretation. Sometimes, the stars align that way!

DA. Here's another SF Symphony / Salonen release where the conductor already had a previous recording of this repertoire in the catalog (with the BPO from 1986). As with the other SF Symphony 2024 releases above, there are a number of great recordings of these excerpts already in the catalog (including Salonen's with the BPO). So what's the "value proposition" then for this new album? For one thing, I do not think that the playing here is inferior to BPO's, and Salonen has managed to convey a similar interpretive enthusiasm in SF. But the engineering has moved on since the 1980's, especially when it comes to subjective frequency extension and dynamic range (even as my ears get older and older - LOL!). With this recording, it's just as they used to say in the old TV commercial: Try it - you'll like it!

Cleveland Orchestra

As with Salonen in SF, I believe that FWM has announced his intention of move on (at the close of the 2026-27 season) after his extended stay as "Musical Director" in Cleveland. And also, as with the Salonen/SF recordings on the orchestra's own label, I've found that FWM's recordings on the Cleveland Orchestra's own label are certainly among the best engineered recordings I know of from Cleveland.

DA. As much as I can see why Bartok wrote his string quartets the way he did, I also like the "tinkerings" I've heard, as other folks add stuff to these works, such as that metal-band drummer on YouTube, drumming along with the Emerson Quartet on one of the quartet movements - very entertaining IMHO. And, in contrast to a lot of "expansion by orchestration" attempts by composers and arrangers of the Beethoven and Schubert Quartets, I think Stanley Konopka's arrangement of the whole Bartok Third Quartet works fabulously well - I love it when those double basses in his version dig down deep and "get ready to rumble"! Would Bartok have approved? Who knows? But I certainly enjoy it! As for "The Miraculous Mandarin", this recording seemed to provoke discussion all over the internet as to whether FWM was trying to instill a "kinder, gentler" view of what most of us take as some pretty brutal music! This recording is certainly NOT the way I'd always want to hear it, but it's certainly an interesting experience to hear FWM's imposition of a completely different aesthetic once, or maybe twice! ;-)

DA. No signs of "kinder and gentler" in this performance, although FWM does manage to reveal some interesting balances and colors along the way. I'm so glad that this Symphony, perhaps the greatest Symphony in the 20th century, can be heard in Dolby Atmos in such an expert reading, performed by such expert players, and recorded by such accomplished engineers. The work is still not as well known as it deserves to be, and I applaud FWM for recording not only this Symphony, but three others by Prokofiev in this series - another three and he'll complete the whole cycle.

DA. While perhaps not at the level of the Jarvi, Jurowski and Honeck Bruckner recordings this past year, FWM's Bruckner Fourth is still of interest, and I feel that it's still recommendable. Certainly, the orchestral playing and the engineering are imposing and ear-catching.

There was one other FWM/Cleveland release this year wherein FWM applied his "kinder and gentler" approach to music which didn't take too well to it, and that was with the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique. Especially in competition with the Salonen recording (above), I just felt that this FWM recording didn't quite stack up.

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

This orchestra released a huge number of its own recordings on its own label in 2023, but there weren't nearly so many in 2024.

DA. Who would have thought that one of the very first recordings of the Organ Symphony in Dolby Atmos would be with the VPO? But here it is - and a very fine effort it is too! I really have nothing negative to say about it, other than to note that the initial entrance of the organ in the fourth movement (oops! I mean the final part of the second movement!) doesn't have quire enough floor shaking bass for my taste, although the balance IS just the way I like it. Also on this album are the Ravel Rapsodie espagnole (another unusual work for the VPO to be recording), and the Chausson Poeme, with VPO concert master Volkhard Steude as soloist. In all three of these works, I was impressed with the work of conductor Alain Atinoglu, whom I had not heard before. (But if he's good enough for the VPO, he's certainly good enough for me!)

DA. Big band Mozart is becoming a rare commodity these days, so we need to seize it when we find it! And Muti's way with Mozart has almost always been on my wavelength. Here, in the Haffner Symphony, he emphasizes the orchestra's rich tonal substance, and, in addition, he omits the last two notes of the Menuetto found in many published scores, but which are not in Mozart's manuscript. Take THAT, HIPsters! I have not listened yet to the other works on the album (Hindemith's Konzartmusik, Op. 50 and Mendelssohn's Reformation Symphony, which, I suspect might be some worthy competition for Paavo Jaarvi's performance with the ZTO in his complete set of Mendelssohn Symphonies on Alpha).

Concertgebouw Orchestra

As with the VPO, the Concertgebouw released much less on their own label in 2024 compared to how much they released in 2023. I'm wondering with these two orchestras if the economic slump in Europe has had anything to do with this situation.

DA. Here's an album where the Concertgeouw Orchestra plays - but not at the Concertgebouw! Here, they're playing at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg - a fairly new hall which is said to have turned out incredibly well for acoustics.[EDIT: I missed part of the copy/paste on my original post. My impression is that the right-to-left spread is narrower here than at the Concertgebouw. And as for Chung's performance, it seems excellent, although I think the peasants in the second movement are a little TOO light on their feet in the second movement Landler!]

One final "bonus" pick is NOT from 2024 (it's from 2019), but I'm including it because I first heard it less than a month ago:

Blu-ray disc with (lossless) Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and Auro-3D. So this disc is from 2019 and represents how technology can be used to recreate a "lost" acoustic space within a completely different acoustic space. We've had discussions here about the "artifice" used in creating Dolby Atmos versions of recordings which started life as plain old stereo. But in this case, the engineers took measurements of the sound within the Hagia Sophia (Church of Holy Wisdom) in Istanbul (by popping a balloon at different locations within the building and measuring the sound from various distances) in that acoustic. The reason for this is that Erdogan (the President of Turkiye) decided to turn the building, which had been a museum and concert hall of sorts, back into a Mosque in which musical performances would be forbidden. (When it was completed, in 537, it had been a Christian Church, but was changed into a Mosque when the Turks conquered Constantinople - now Istanbul - in 1453.) So the only way to save this unique sound (with its 12-second reverb time!) was to get the measurements, and then apply them digitally, ex post facto, to a performance which the Capella Romana gave at Stanford University. (I'm not sure if it was at Bing Concert Hall or a studio at Stanford's Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities - it doesn't seem to me that the booklet is clear about this, although the included documentary film shows the Capella Romana performing at Bing Concert Hall. This Stanford location, whether it was Bing Hall or a Stanford CCARH studio, itself had only a 2-second reverb time. So what happened was that the engineering team imposed the Hagia Sophia acoustic on the Stanford acoustic. (BTW, Andrew Quint has a more extensive write-up of the procedures in TAS.) In any case, the result is IMHO pretty mind blowing - and I think you really need one of the immersive formats to appreciate how miraculous the result has been. The program itself consists of Byzantine Chants which IIRC are from about the year 1000. I'm just glad to have heard this in my lifetime - I'm by no means a believer, but even I am tempted to exclaim, "Laus Deo!".

So. . . that's kind of it for 2024, although I'm absolutely sure I've forgotten some things, which I might post about in a supplement in another week or two.

Edits: 12/16/24