‘Beethoven: The Complete Piano Concertos’ (Nonesuch): Ivan Fischer, the principal conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra, is one of the most-recorded conductors around today. But his recordings are made not with the NSO but with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which he founded and has built into one of the most interesting orchestras around. They recently issued the Mahler Fourth, the latest in their ongoing Mahler cycle. But in light of Fischer's project next year to do a Beethoven symphony cycle in New York jointly with the BFO and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, it is worth visiting this recently released Beethoven account, recorded live in Budapest in 2005.This is luminously clear Beethoven. Fischer is never going to have the crisp tautness of, say, a David Zinman (I really enjoy his Tonhalle Orchestra recording of the symphonies); Fischer's heart is always on his sleeve. But his approach here is rest-rainedly classical. Rather than wallowing in big ph-rases, he keeps clean and supple and out of the way.
In fact, restraint is a hallmark and, perhaps, a slight drawback of the set as a whole. It is, of course, a trait of the soloist, Richard Goode, whose presence here is the point of the exercise; for Nonesuch, this release represents a bookend to Goode's accounting of the complete sonatas back in the 1990s. Goode's playing is clean, often very beautiful, and sometimes finicky. And these recordings are so beautifully schooled that they take on a sort of sameness; even the Emperor is suspiciously well mannered. There are always moments that capture the ear, but overall, you can find many other more exciting accounts of the cycle -- including, in fact, Zinman's, with Yefim Bronfman.
‘Mahler: Eighth Symphony’ (LSO Live): Valery Gergiev's cycle of the Mahler symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra is definitely Mahler for the 21st century: powerful, idiosyncratic, but also a little twitchy and nervous. This last trait certainly fits Mahler's tendency to spring from one idea to another. But hyperkinesis is an unusual quality in the Eighth, which is often seen as the odd man out in this oeuvre. You could call it the opera Mahler never wrote: Massive even by Mahler's standards, it involves huge orchestral and choral forces and eight soloists singing the final and possibly most enigmatic scene of Goethe's "Faust," Part 2. It's a piece that tends to steamroll listeners.
Whether because of its weirdness or its power, Gergiev saved it for the final recording of his cycle. But it would have been hard to predict the singular effects of bringing his moment-by-moment approach and a host of fine musicians (including the Choir of Eltham College and Washington's Choral Arts Society) into St. Paul's Cathedral for this performance and live recording. The mikes do all too fine a job of capturing the church's echoey acoustic, which has an alienating effect: It creates a halo of indistinct sound on the one hand, and on the other the individual parts emerge in relief, without the warm blend of a wood-lined concert hall. Recording here was going to be a challenge.
The result is oddly episodic. The sound is a consistent distraction. And the soloists are only decent, not great, though they sing honestly. Yet the odd space also focuses attention on some moments of truly gorgeous playing from the orchestra: silvery flutes, shining strings and, at the end, an actual sense that one is moving into an otherworldly realm. The massed choruses are fine and strong. And Gergiev, forced to work extra hard to keep it all together, is less prone to interpretive foibles than on some of the other recordings in this cycle. This Eighth is a glass-half-full proposition; some will be put off by the sound and the so-so soloists, but optimists will find some fine playing in its favor. © The Washington Post 2009
