Gustavo Dudamel - Symphony 5 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

In this fascinating recording the legendary Neeme Järvi explores two lesser-known French ballets by Sauguet and Ibert, complemented by the Ballet Suite from Massenet's opera Hérodiade. Sauguet studied composition with Canteloube and Koechlin. He wrote in a variety of genres, notably for radio and for film, but his ballet scores - more than twenty of them - were central to his output. Les Forains, ('The Showfolk'), was first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in March 1945. The cast was led by the work's brilliant young choreographer, Roland Petit, and conducted by André Cluytens. Sauget's wide-ranging influences, notably the orchestration of Richard Strauss as well as the works of Satie and les Six, give his work a flowing, openly melodic style that is immediately appealing and full of wit and charm. Following the success of Les Forains, and the formal establishment in October 1945 of Les Ballets des Champs-Élysées, Roland Petit and Boris Kochno devised a number of new ballets for the company. One of these was Ibert's Les Amours de Jupiter, premiered on 9 March 1946 with a cast led by Petit himself as Jupiter

Between 1950 and 1980, he was one of the most important conductors of international standing, and yet he has been somewhat forgotten Karl Böhm was the antistar among the podium greats of his time, a decidedly businesslike servant of the music. For the first time, two Lucerne concert recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic, with whom he was closely associated for decades, are released Bruckner's Seventh Symphony and - a solitaire in Böhm's discography - an upbeat Hindemith concerto. In the summer of 1970, Böhm, by all means an advocate of contemporary music in his younger years, performed Paul Hindemith's 1949 Concerto for Woodwinds, Harp and Orchestra in Lucerne. The three-movement work offers the five-member Concertino group grateful playing tasks and, with it's quotation from Mendelssohn's Wedding March, makes reference to Hindemith's own silver wedding anniversary. In addition to Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Strauss, the symphonies of Anton Bruckner were also central to Böhm's concert repertoire. Böhm's Bruckner interpretations possess an aura, but it is neither the religiously pathos-laden one of Eugen Jochum, nor the pathetically worldly one of Sergiu Celibidache, nor the matter-of-factly austere one of Nikolaus Harnoncourt. This is also evident in the Lucerne recording of the Seventh Symphony from September 1964 Böhm never loses sight of the whole and yet plays out every articulatory detail with almost scrupulous fidelity to the text. He follows Bruckner's blocky editing technique without aggressively emphasizing it. He does not avoid the music's solemn monumentality, but neither does he exaggerate it into false, violent pathos.

The organist Andrea Toschi with this work continues the musical research he started with his two previous record productions - The mystical violin between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (tc.870002) and Divertimento italiano - Music for harmonium and piano in the nineteenth-century salons (tc. 850004) - aiming to search within the forgotten heritage brought to light through a demanding research activity. The repertoire features composers that in the period of the early twentieth century adhered to the new impulse given by the Cecilian Movement strongly reacting to the domination of the theatrical style that during the nineteenth century 'contaminated' the liturgical music. The vast anthology of pieces presented in this double CD offers to us an interesting perspective of the Italian organ background animated by the spirit of the reform. The use of the Vittino Vegezzi-Bossi 1882-2019 organ gives the performance the correct aesthetic from the point of view of a philological and historically correct performance practice.