Orchestral reviews

cello. Both are fine players who respond with civility and spirit to Järvi’s cogent and forthright lead. The recording, which dates from 2004, is

first-rate. EMI has twice coupled the Brahms Double

and Beethoven Triple concertos by marrying classic contemporary recordings featuring similar artists. With Hesselink and Gunnarsson donning their Trio Poseidon hats in the Beethoven, Chandos appears to go one better by using the same team in both works. Alas, it is not as simple as that. No longer judged the bumpkin work it was

once thought to be, the Triple Concerto is to all intents and purposes a sinfonia concertante for violin and cello with a simpler comprimario piano part (too prominently balanced in the new recording) conceived by Beethoven for his pupil, Archduke Rudolph. Beethoven worked assiduously on the concerto, fashioning new procedures and creating a glorious, often high-lying role for the solo cello. What the work is not is a concerto for piano

trio and orchestra, a point even the Beaux Arts struggled to refute (Philips, 4/78 – nla). The finest recordings have featured cellists of princely standing: Fournier with Schneiderhan, Anda and Fricsay (DG, 10/61 – nla) or Rostropovich with Oistrakh and Richter, a recording Richter later peevishly disowned, bad-mouthing Rostropovich for colluding with Karajan over their tempo (par for the course, as it happens) in the brief but intense Largo. Goodness knows what Richter would have

made of the new recording. Järvi sets an even slower tempo in the Largo, where an over- zealous cellist is upstaged by his violinist’s vibrato-laden descants. Järvi himself seems out of sorts with the piece, making for cruder, coarser music-making than in the Brahms.

Richard Osborne

Brahms

Symphonies – No 1, Op 68a; No 2; Op 73b

London Philharmonic Orchestra / Vladimir Jurowski

LPOM b LPO0043 (86’ • DDD)

Recorded live at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on aMay 25 and bSeptember 27, 2008

Smooth and suave concert readings of Brahms’s first two symphonies

Brahms laboured for the best part of two decades over his First Symphony and this is a disarmingly fluent account of it. The

fluency is evident at the very outset in Jurowski’s brisk traversal of the introduction. Toscanini was similarly brisk. He, however, articulated with rather more rigour the complex

18 GRAMOPHONE MAY 2010

weave of motifs Brahms introduced into what was in fact his final addition to the work. Jurowski offers an abundance of expressive shading yet there is little sense of an emergent argument, either here or in the triple-time Allegro which seems more balletic than symphonic. There is further agreeable playing in the two inner movements where tempi are similarly brisk, after which the finale’s advance is both suave and sure-footed. It is, however, more an endorsement of the musical argument than an exploration of it. The Second Symphony, which followed the

First with such uncharacteristic speed, is so wonderfully evolved from its own first principles that it can seem to play itself. Once again Jurowski offers us a free-flowing, finely nuanced account of the music, with clear-eyed winds, expressive brass and a string ensemble in which lambent-toned violas and cellos are properly to the fore. What the reading tends to smooth over are those intimations of menace with which even this major-key idyll is occasionally visited. I think of the trombones’ grinding canonic exchanges in the first movement development or the before-dawn chill which descends on the music in the lead towards the finale’s recapitulation, a passage over which Toscanini laboured long and hard during a pre-war rehearsal in which the BBC SO was more or less flayed alive. Working in a more consensual age,

Jurowski’s players acquit themselves nobly within the parameters of what is being asked of them and are rewarded with sound that borders on studio quality. I was disappointed by the submerged sound of the semi-dissonant horn solo – another moment of doubt and dissolution – which ushers in the coda of the Second Symphony’s first movement but that is perhaps as much an interpretative failing as a technical one. Richard Osborne

Bruckner

Symphony No 5 (ed Haas)

Hague Residentie Orchestra / Neeme Järvi

Chandos FÍ CHSA5080 (62’ • DDD/DSD)

Selected comparisons: LPO, Welser-Möst (4/95) (EMI) 555125-2 VPO, Furtwängler (1/96) (EMI) 565750-2 VPO, Harnoncourt (4/05) (RCA) 82876 60749-2 Philh, Zander (5/09) (TELA) 2CD80706

Speed and efficiency in a work it’s worth lingering over for longer

It is not unusual to

hear the music of composers of the Baroque period being subjected to what in literary circles is known as speed-reading. But this is the first time I have heard the practice applied to Bruckner. “Performance duration in the region of 80 minutes,” says the preface

to Robert Haas’s 1937 critical edition of the Fifth Symphony. Järvi and his players dispatch it in 62. The Adagio is raced through in a mere

11 minutes: this for a movement that cannot be plausibly played in fewer than 15. Harnoncourt in his fine Vienna Philharmonic recording is also fairly brisk, more Allegretto than Adagio, treating the composer’s expression of despair much as he might treat a threnody by Bach. Furtwängler, somewhat surprisingly, takes a not dissimilar view, as does Welser-Möst. What distinguishes these performances, and Benjamin Zander’s in his remarkable two-disc performance-cum- memoir and spoken analysis, is that they have something to say in human terms. Järvi merely sounds efficient and disengaged. Järvi is too good a technician not to take his

players with him. Indeed the Dutch musicians display a certain daredevil nonchalance as they breeze their way through the epic 635-bar finale. Years ago theDaily Telegraph’s Peter Stadlen landed himself in Private Eye’s “Pseuds’ Corner” when he wrote “Surely we have a right to be bored by Bruckner”. On this occasion, chance would be a fine thing. Richard Osborne

Bruckner

Symphonies – No 8 (ed Haas);

No 7 (ed Nowak) – Adagioa

Montreal Metropolitan Orchestra / Yannick Nézet-Séguin

ATMA Classique F b ACD2

2513 (124’ • DDD) afrom ACD2 2512 (6/07)

Nézet-Séguin isn’t quite ready for the challenges of this cathedral in sound

Love is definitely not all you need in Bruckner’s Eighth. While many who attended his Eighth with the London Philharmonic last autumn thought they were listening to a fully fledged Bruckner conductor, Yannick Nézet- Séguin admitted (in so many words) to The Guardian that he was still learning how to play the game. He was right to do so. The broadcast revealed the orchestra playing superbly, and at identical tempi they found impetus in parts of the Adagio that here drift by in a feelgood haze. Go to 17'30" and you could be on the last page of Mahler’s Ninth. Those tempi are as slow though no slower

than Giulini, Nézet-Séguin’s one-time mentor, but the younger man pulls back at the approach of every point of conflict or resolution. If this is a cathedral in sound, we’re being taken round the Stations of the Cross in a large and splendid nave by a young priest more preoccupied by private devotion than the agony of the Passion. Beneath the Adagio’s chorale (at 7'30") is a string tremolo, literal and regular. Perhaps the

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